pg_protobuf: Protobuf support for PostgreSQL

in PostgreSQL

Yesterday I had a few spare hours (I was waiting for 'Star Wars VIII' movie session, which BTW turned out to be great) so I decided to implement one idea I had in mind for quite some time. The idea is to add support of Protobuf datatype to PostgreSQL.

The result can be found on GitHub. Here is a short example from README.md:

create extension pg_protobuf;

create table heroes (x bytea);

insert into heroes values
  (E'\\x0a0365617810321880022202100f'),
  (E'\\x0a07616669736b6f6e10191880082a060a0200011064')
  -- ...
  ;

create function hero_name(x bytea) returns text as $$
begin
return protobuf_get_string(x, 1);
end
$$ language 'plpgsql' immutable;

create function hero_hp(x bytea) returns text as $$
begin
return protobuf_get_integer(x, 2);
end
$$ language 'plpgsql' immutable;

create function hero_xp(x bytea) returns text as $$
begin
return protobuf_get_integer(x, 3);
end
$$ language 'plpgsql' immutable;

create index hero_name_idx on heroes using btree(hero_name(x));

select protobuf_decode(x) from heroes where hero_name(x) = 'afiskon';

The extension seems to work and pass basic tests, however more thorough testing is required which I'm going to do in nearest few days.

Basically pg_protobuf solves same issues that zson solves but without any shared dictionaries that should be relearned from time to time.

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