We have been looking for a new standard method for serializing objects from the server. Schemas, Replication Events, Tables, etc... all for one reason or another have to be serialized at some juncture at the moment. Each type has its own method/language which makes it a bit of a pain to deal with in the server.

Worse?

Few of the formats are upgradable. You end up with all sorts of incompatibilities that over time have become a real PIA to deal with.

Introducing Google's Protocol Buffers:
http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/

In short, this buys us an upgradable format and a lot less code. It also makes it much simple to write trivial little tools to pull apart objects from the server.

I pushed the first bit of this into Drizzle last night, and picked a low hanging piece of fruit, the …