So essentially the binary records are tagged with a record type, which is used by the tool (via a library maintained by another team) to provide metadata (field

So essentially the binary records are tagged with a record type, which is used by the tool (via a library maintained by another team) to provide metadata (field names, types, ordering etc) for that record type. Human meaningful field names are made available when records are processed in your awk expressions. This is an improvement over using a delimited text dump of the record and using regular awk with meaningless $1, $2 variables. I could be wrong, but I believe the relational operators also recognize common record field types like dates and timestamps that a text dump + regular awk couldn't. The output of the tool is always a human readable serialization.