Protobuf
Protocol Buffers
Judgement: Adopt
Strong schema-evolution rules; default for gRPC.
Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral mechanism for serialising structured data. Compact binary encoding plus strong schema evolution rules.
The schema language behind gRPC and many internal RPC stacks. Open source but governed by Google, so it sits in the same vendor-driven bucket as dbt.
Why it counts as a standard
The .proto language and the wire format are publicly specified, with compilers and runtimes for every major language. gRPC, Schema Registry, and countless internal RPC stacks depend on the format definition rather than Google's implementation. That is the standard surface, even though Google governs it.
At a glance
- Category
- Schema
- Governance
- Google (open source, vendor-driven)
- Status
- Stable; de-facto schema for binary RPC
- First released
- 2008
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Schema.
- AVRO Schema — Apache Avro Schema
- JSON Schema
- SQL DDL — SQL Data Definition Language
- XML Schema — XML Schema Definition (XSD)
- LinkML — Linked data Modeling Language
- Table Schema — Frictionless Table Schema
See Protobuf in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Protobuf against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.