Are there any databases that support protocol buffers?

database protocol-buffers
Rob Lachlan picture Rob Lachlan · May 9, 2010 · Viewed 11.7k times · Source

Are there any databases, in either the SQL or NoSQL worlds, that support protocol buffers? (Support could mean various things, but hopefully would include being able to index on fields in protocol buffers.)

Answer

allenporter picture allenporter · May 31, 2010

I am not aware of any (not that they don't exist, I just don't know about them), but perhaps it is worth discussing an alternate strategy and the pros and cons.

Typically you would want to store a serialized version of your protocol buffer, indexed by some particular key (a unique identifier, perhaps). You could then build secondary indexes for other interesting fields that point to that unique identifier. The idea is that you would want explicit indexes like this to scale beyond what a system that provides arbitrary indexes. This obviously opens up a world of new problems (such as stale arbitrary indexes).

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