MariaDB Essentials

Creating and importing CSV files

CSV is the most common file format used for data interchange. CSV files are readable by a human being, so they can be examined or modified with a simple text editor, like vim or gedit on Linux, or Notepad++ on Windows. The format rules are very simple, so it is also very easy to write a script that reads, writes, or modifies the CSV data. Among the human-readable data formats, CSV is the least verbose, which makes it suitable for non-trivial amounts of data.

There are other, human-readable formats such as JSON or XML, as well. They are much more flexible than CSV: they can be used to store any type of data, including trees, graphs, and non-structured information. Because of this characteristic, they require more ...