Yeah -- that's one of the huge benefits of marking a field as ``required'' in a protobuf. The ability to enforce a contract prevents a ton of unexpected and incomplete data making it on disk (and also, e.g., across the wire to clients). Having strict types represented in the serialization format is also handy; when one pulls out an int32 from a protobuf it's going to be an int32, and not an integer that somehow found its way into being a string.
Could you elaborate more on how you have used Protobuffs, as I'm not sure I fully understand. I've previously used Riak in Erlang and Ruby projects, so am fairly familiar with how it works. It exposes a HTTP and Protobuffs API which allows you to store objects of arbitrary types (JSON, Erlang binary terms, Images, Word Documents, etc). From the sounds of it you are serialising a Protobuffs packet and sending this as the content of the object. Why did you choose this, over say JSON, which MongoDB uses?
