But both XML and SQLite have the same issue: They give you just enough rope to hang yourself with. While SQLite is a fantastic micro-database engine and a file format, it isn't a very good universal B2B format because there are too many features you'd have to support to interoperate.
I'd argue CSV's biggest strength is that it is easy to parse correctly, because the format is so simple and the standard is largely the superset. The biggest problem for CSV is that the most popular desktop application for view CSV (Microsoft Excel) sucks at it, and causes data corruption on save (and has for at least twenty years).
If people wanted a relational database as a file, I can think of nothing better than SQLite, but in B2B you want automated tooling that can parse the format without human involvement. If you need some structure there are some simpler XML-based formats which accommodate that, but still offer far fewer features you'd have to support than SQLite does.
Ajax might become popular in this space, but I'm yet to see it.
Not sure I resonate with that. I work with large CSVs of varying provenance every day (I work in big data) and there's always some CSV edge case that stymies my analysis pipeline.
Timestamp parsing is extremely hard if it's not ISO-8601, as well as handling of unicode encoding, missing data, type inference, European usage of , as a decimal point, hidden characters, etc. One of the costs of almost complete freedom in input is the "interesting" possibilities people come up with to stymie your code.
The Pandas read_csv method has tons of switches to deal with all kinds of CSV parsing definitions precisely because there is no standard. Fortunately this covers 80% of the use-cases. https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/panda...
Excel's CSV parsing isn't the greatest, but does a surprisingly decent job considering how ill-defined CSV is.
XML isn't really on anyone's radar in the big data world. It's an interchange format yes but is hugely inefficient for dataframe-type data.
No, it really doesn't. Save this as a CSV, open it in Excel, hit save, and then review the raw CSV:
"1000000000012345", "Hello",
"2000000000067890", "World",
Here's what Excel (O365) does to it for me:
1E+15, Hello,
2E+15, World,
That data is now permanently lost. And this corruption occurs for almost all EAN/UPCs. There are many ways to get around this in Excel, but the default experience is data corruption and has been for most of my lifetime. It is a terrible application for CSV. If they followed the standard every column would be what it is: Text.
> XML isn't really on anyone's radar in the big data world.
But is a central theme in the business to business back-end systems world. I'm talking about ordering, invoicing, remittances, hospital records, hospital billing, and so on. No clue what "big data" is, we deal with billions of transactions a year, but that's likely not what you're referring to.
Arguably, there should have been an explicit Excel switch which forces all CSV data to be parsed as raw strings.
I've seen problems with Excel CSVs that are worse than that: I have serial numbers that have leading 0's that have semantic meaning, like 000002324122323. Most CSV parsers cannot tell that this isn't a numeric type and so handle it wrongly. So I resort to [1].
2. Big data is of course somewhat ambiguous nomenclature as well, but is nowadays typically understood to mean the Hadoop ecosystem or similar. Data is typically ingested into a distributed file system (HDFS, S3, etc.) in formats such as Parquet, Avro, JSON and often CSV. A schema-on-read database like Hive sits on top of this layer and presents a SQL interface to the user. Tools like Apache Spark provide programmatic transformations that operate on the data on the large.
CSV is often promoted as a format for storing structured data due to ease of ingestion and inspection (all you need is a text editor for troubleshooting). However, you pay a performance penalty every time an analytic query is run because CSV doesn't support indexes, predicate pushdowns, compression, etc. and records can sometimes be uninterpretable under certain schemas (in which case they are simply excluded or dropped).
Sometimes having one too many commas in a row can completely mess things up (all the columns get shifted in a record) -- I found this out the hard way when Spark exported malformed CSVs with un-escaped commas.
[1] http://support.pitneybowes.com/SearchArticles/VFP06_Knowledg...
I would also disagree that Excel does a good job with CSV. Well, maybe opening files but certainly not saving them as it rewrites values in weird ways. Back when I used to have to handle CSVs regularly (which admittedly was a while ago now) I found OpenOffice Calc to be far superior in terms of CSV support. I'd assume the same is true for LibreOffice Calc but honestly I've not done a huge amount with CSV since.
(goes on to say a bunch of applications don't parse it correctly; lets add mssql to the pile)
While that's not exactly correct - CSV can be quite hard to parse if you want to cover each and every variation and edge case - for all practical intents and purposes that statement is true in my opinion.
CSV is something of a lowest common denominator, a compromise between well-defined, structured data and portability / accessibility.
See https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-form...
I'm working with a client who had to split up their data into several XLSX files because they hit a row limit.
They can of course ETL the data into a real SQL database, but ETL tools for end users are still not a common thing plus not all end users have access to a SQL database.
[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-specification...
The industry doesn't really use XLSX or XLS because they're unreliable to parse without Microsoft's Office libraries which require Windows licenses, and the two formats have a huge amount of overhead compared to XML formats and CSV (which costs money on VANs).
This is a space where plain text files and binary is still king. Formats like EDI are still massive. In many ways CSV and XML are the new kids on the block.
Only end users are sending Excel formatted files (and PDFs) to one another.
XLS yes, however XLSX is just easy to parse if you document only contains simple types. of course with embedded mathml/wordml it gets a little bit wierd.
Non-coders technical users
I find this very useful to quickly summarize, filter, reorder/rename columns etc. in csv files.
Big data applications tend to use other structured binary formats like parquet and avro, which any big data tool can typically parse.
If you have any idea how to do it, I'd be more than glad to hear about it.
There are free alternatives, but many require programming.
SQLite on the other hand has a lightweight SQL REPL that can be invoked from the command line.
Spark can work with SQLite via JDBC, though obviously it isn't as native as Parquet. Between SQLite and Parquet, I might pick Parquet under most circumstances.
But it seems to me SQLite ought to at least be a better option than CSV for Spark jobs (less work needed to do type inference, predicate pushdowns are trivial, etc.)
SQlite is usually a single file representing a database though, I don't know how it would work with partitioning and stuff, and then how to handle the schema evolving across sqlite files.
I'm inclined to say we are. R, for instance, includes an embedded sqlite, and it seems to be used a lot.
Related link: https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html
There's your reason.
Simple, I can edit this with only a text editor if need be.
CSV can be difficult and ambiguous to parse correctly (because there's no real standard) and isn't extremely performant. The only thing it has going for it is its universality.
SQLite is lightweight, structured, supports indexing for performance and is extremely easy to use.