Protobuf

PgDog is a Rust-based PostgreSQL proxy. They discovered Protobuf serialization was the real bottleneck in SQL query parsing — not the Postgres parser itself. By replacing Protobuf with direct C-to-Rust FFI bindings, they achieved 5-10x faster parsing.

gRPC can indeed be much faster than REST, but most teams are right to stick with REST. Let’s talk about the real cost behind the speed.