>Personally I think raw data bytes are OK if functions for getting all
keys and values from this data are provided
What is the purpose of using Thrift "encoding" if it turns out to be a simple wrapper for existing binary data?
Do you mean the goal is to have "get/set" functions to fetch data out of bytea field?
Frankly speaking, I can hardly imagine why one would want to store MAP Datum inside Thrift inside bytea.
Vladimir