> A binary dump format is not only not available, it's not even theoretically possible since any byte sequence can be present in any blob which makes format bytes impossible, or at least very difficult - something like MIME boundaries works but is heavy on checking for boundary matches in content, which doesn't matter much for typical e-mail, but will for DBs. It also means even small blobs will add large boundary identifiers, which will take away from the saving. I disagree here. A format using a length/value format would need no encoding of the blobs, nor boundary markers. I.e. each value, binary or not, would be preceded by its length in bytes. This could a be simple fixed 64bit unsigned int, or some kind of varint coding to keeping coding of small numbers short(er). Lots of varints codings to choose from. A natural extension of LV is TLV, i.e. adding a tag before the LV sequence. The tag describes what the value is for. Lots of binary formats using this kind of structure (TIFF, JPEG, EXIF, PNG, etc. ...) Note that I read the original request as a binary format for the entire dump, and not just the binary blobs he has.