integer 1000 is one byte What sort of byte? Mine only represent integers from 0 to 255. More seriously, I don't buy your implied argument that plain text rep

integer 1000 is one byte What sort of byte? Mine only represent integers from 0 to 255. More seriously, I don't buy your implied argument that plain text representations are less compact. Whether or not this is true depends more on the specifics of your domain and the system you use. For much of the data I work with the strongly typed database representation is often larger then the plain untyped (ASCII) source.