About the Binary Catalog Format

Maintaining the catalog in a binary file format has several advantages over maintaining the catalog in a text format.

• The catalog is more compact in binary format. The binary representations of numbers, dates, and so on, takes up less disk space than the text representations.
• The catalog in binary format is much faster to browse and search, especially for large file sizes.
• The catalog in binary format supports alternate backup methods without requiring post-processing, improving catalog performance for alternate backup methods.