@aljoscha

Whatever you want it to look like. The simplest approach would specify lengths instead of sizes at the beginning of arrays, sets, objects, but using exactly the same encoding otherwise.

I asked you how you would do it. can you be more specific? I want to be able to point to an officially sanctioned spec for in-place parsable collections. I wasn't asking you to put it in the signing spec: I was asking, can I have a in-place version of this?

In-place reads optimizes for the database, and the database is the bottleneck.
The database has to process hundreds of thousands of messages as fast as possible.

Of course, you can still parse an in-place format.
But if you have process many records in bulk, you don't have to.