Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain your comment in more detail as I am not really sure what you getting at with "the defacto standard wire protocol for relational databases" nor "grow into" something like CockroachDB".
In the case of CockroachDB (a distributed database), it has the same wire-level protocol as Postgresql. So if your programming language has a Postgresql driver (and it likely does), then you can also talk to a CDB database as well. The SQL dialects are not the same , though they are similar, so you will have to go through your code to see if you need to fix anything. Moving the data itself over is fairly straight-for…
Ok, so the "driver protocol" would be another way of saying that.