I am interested in using protocol buffers for the following scenario:

I have a large number of small data points I need to serialize to a
file. Once this serialization process is complete, the data will be
strictly read only, accessed by multiple threads, until I need to
create a new version of the file. The application will access the file
at startup, and while executing will need to retrieve data points
based on a given parameter. Pretty much behaves like tabular data you
would find in a database table. I need to retrieve a "row", based on a
"primary key". Yet a traditional database is not a good solution in
this situation.

My understanding is that it's not a good idea to have large messages,
but you can have a large number of small messages within a file, and
it shouldn't be a problem. I have seen the .proto file structure and
how messages are determined. What I don't understand (maybe I missed
that part in the documentation) is how to make searches for messages
within a file. If I use the "repeated" qualifier, it will let me have
more than one message in another one, but I'll just retrieve it as a
list. I can't specify what subset of messages I want.

Can I sort messages based on a given field?
Can I request a subset of messages by index range, or some other
criteria?
Can I "browse" through a message file, given a particular search
parameter?
Can I have some sort of Map inside the .proto definition, where I
organize elements in key - value fashion?

Alternatively, are my assumptions of what I should be able to do with
protocol buffers wrong from the start? I assumed this kind of thing
was possible since the drizzle devs are using protocol buffers for
their database implementation. Link below.

http://drizzle.org/wiki/Table_Proto_Definition

Thanks in advance.
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