This looks really promising. Here’s what I’d suggest. Can you take a small detour, and implement your data parsing and conversion ideas for the existing data set? As we discussed, I couldn’t think of any concrete edge cases where what you proposed would cause data loss. And the parsing optimization seems very interesting, so it’s worth a try.
Generate similar benchmarks for other data, like dates, ints, floats, etc. Or not. Because it’s pretty obvious that those would be faster when parsed in binary representation than string. So, I’d say, let’s just do it. If it helps in benchmarks, it’s going to help overall.
We do that once, and then we keep the data in memory at least until we exceed the memory threshold. So, access is pretty fast after the first load.
Don’t worry about it. As I said, we keep the PL in memory.
We can just ask our users to give us data in WKT or GeoJSON format?