Database Reference
In-Depth Information
]
}
Protocol Buffers (protobuf)
License
BSD Simplified
Activity
Medium
Purpose
Data Serialization
Official Page
Hadoop Integration API Compatible
One common theme you'll see expressed throughout this topic is the trade-off between flex-
ibility and performance. Sometimes you want to easily share data with other folks and you're
willing to take a hit in performance to make sure that data is easy to consume. There will be
other occasions where you need to maximize your performance and find that you're willing
to trade away flexibility in order to get it—on those occasions, you're going to want to take a
look at Protocol Buffers.
The primary reason for this trade-off is that Protocol Buffers is
compile-time assembled
. This
means you need to define the precise structure for your data when you build your applica-
tion, a stark contrast to Avro's
runtime assembly
, which allows you to define the structure of
your data while the application is running, or JSON's even more flexible, schema-less
design. The upside of compile-time assembly is the code that actually serializes and deserial-
izes your data is likely to be more optimized, and you do not need to pay the cost of building
that code while your application is running.
Protocol Buffers is intended to be fast, simple, and small. As a result, it has less support for
programming languages and complex data types than other serialization frameworks such as
Thrift.
