[aq9]

So, a lot would depend on what you plan on passing the protobufs over. Plain TCP? gRPC? gRPC kinda sucks for this, the serialization/deserialization can be moderately expensive (CPU); and gRPC's multiplexing of multiple flows onto the same connection can be hard to reason about (i.e. debug); and the performance characteristics are not great either.

[fearthetelomere]

I didn't consider that gRPC ser/deser was somewhat expensive. Then that would also be true for the TCP case too, right?

Assuming I'm sending data over plain TCP, would Protobuf be comparable in performance to another DB wire protocol? Or am I better off selecting a proven protocol like Postgres and using that?