Protobuf, short for Protocol Buffers, is a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Developed by Google, it's akin to JSON or XML but is typically smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once using a special definition language in .proto files, and then you can use generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.
syntax = "proto3";
message SearchRequest {
string query = 1;
int32 page_number = 2;
int32 results_per_page = 3;
}
Protobuf is a popular choice for data serialization in streaming systems, especially when used with platforms like Apache Kafka:
RisingWave supports Protobuf (along with other formats like Avro and JSON) for data ingestion, allowing users to work with a variety of existing data sources and serialization standards.