I'm currently working on a `FlatMapFormat`, which ...

# serialization

[josephivie]

I'm currently working on a FlatMapFormat, which will serialize/deserialize to a map of strings to primitives and provide a list of columns. I plan to use it for interacting with databases. Any thoughts about it?
Some thoughts I've already had:
- Direct serialization to/from a database might be more efficient, but more work has to be redone for each format.
- Fields of a class type will be embedded, as in fieldWithClassType_fieldInClassType.
- Fields with list/map types can't be embedded in a consistently columned database, so they will be stored in string or bytes columns using another format.