Literally every server (db and otherwise) sees the universe as a sequence of strings that need to be parsed. Native drivers have to encode/decode strings; it's

Literally every server (db and otherwise) sees the universe as a sequence of strings that need to be parsed. Native drivers have to encode/decode strings; it's just that they have full control over the format and can, at their convenience, build it as efficiently (or inefficiently) as they like. The things that reduce this overhead (but don't eliminate it) are things like Protocol Buffers. EDIT: And others. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_data_serialization_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_data_serializati...