The problem

PostgreSQL's bytea type is powerful for storing raw binary data, but it carries no type information. Once you store a value as bytes, you need out-of-band metadata to know whether those bytes represent a number, a UUID, a timestamp, or a JSON object.

This gets painful when you're building dynamic schemas — EAV tables, schemaless document stores, or audit logs — where a single column holds values of different types. You end up carrying a separate type column everywhere, writing CASE expressions to decode it, and hoping they stay in sync.

pg_ilib solves this with a simple idea: prefix every serialized value with a 2-byte typed header.

The format

Byte 0: [ op_id (4 bits) | params_hi (4 bits) ] Byte 1: [ params_lo (8 bits) ] Bytes 2…N: payload

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The op_id identifies the type.…