Comment by jnewhouse

We started developing rowfiles around 2005. Thrift wasn't open sourced until 2007. I couldn't find a date for protobuf's release, but I don't think it was standard outside of google at that time. We use protobufs internally, and have a number of Rows whose field values are byte[]s containing protobufs. One big thing our rowfiles gives us is fast indexing. The only other big data format I know of that gives that is Kudu, which uses the same indexing scheme.