I don't think protobuf was around for public use when we came up with this format, which began around 2005. We use Protobuf internally, and some of our columns

I don't think protobuf was around for public use when we came up with this format, which began around 2005. We use Protobuf internally, and some of our columns are actually byte[]'s containing protobuf data. We now support Parquet and are doing more work with other big data tools, but we've had a hard time matching the performance of our custom stuff.