Vertical protocol documentation

[asterite]

Hi,

Is there any document describing how to connect to a vertica database and issue queries via a tcp socket and what protocol is used?

I'm using a ruby gem to connect to it and it's very slow, I see almost plain text is being transferred in the connection. For example dates are sent as formatted strings instead of just a long for the time since epoch.

I searched the internet and also the documents provided by vertica, but no luck.

Thanks,
Ary