You still have to pay for a 64 bit pointer to an un-interned string though. It's the fact that the keys are repeated for each record that overwhelms the size of

You still have to pay for a 64 bit pointer to an un-interned string though. It's the fact that the keys are repeated for each record that overwhelms the size of the keys or pointers themselves, when you have millions of records. If you are using fixed structures, then the keys are implicit and don't need to be repeated or even represented as pointers, just known fixed offsets into the structures. I wrote this about "Representing and Editing JSON with Spreadsheets": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21109798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21109798 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/representing-and-editing-json-with-spreadsheets-8f8832db5239 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/representing-and-editing-json... SpreadOn: Apply Directly to the Forehead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_SwD7RveNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_SwD7RveNE