They are possible but they are not possible to make per formant compared to the alternative.
Google falls under the "absurd amount of money" camp.
> Protocol Buffers have performance implications for query
processing. First, we always have to fetch entire Protocol Buffer columns from Spanner, even when we are only interested in a small subset of fields.
There are a number of performance costs documented in the paper. Simply because you can solve it via money doesn't mean it works for all situations.
Google falls under the "absurd amount of money" camp.
> Protocol Buffers have performance implications for query processing. First, we always have to fetch entire Protocol Buffer columns from Spanner, even when we are only interested in a small subset of fields.
There are a number of performance costs documented in the paper. Simply because you can solve it via money doesn't mean it works for all situations.