Hi, With light on my recent philosophical question on doubles/uints for the lossy storage on coordinates. I wonder the following; Would it be possible to implement a binary MAPI protocol that can use the native types of the data that is stored within MonetDB? So for example; I create a table: CREATE TABLE helloword (hello varchar(13), world integer); INSERT INTO helloword (hello, world) VALUES ('hoi', 1); And fetch this table: SELECT hello, world FROM helloworld; And receive the MAPI data in the following (too simplistic) way: (len) (string) --> 5 hello 5 world --> 3 hoi 4 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x1 For several reasons the above will not work; the length field is too short (only up to 255) it is also not optimal. I wonder if it can trigger any idea to allow the end user to use native types instead of char[]'s. Stefan