From the course: Learning Data Analytics: 1 Foundations
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Working with flat files
From the course: Learning Data Analytics: 1 Foundations
Working with flat files
- [Instructor] People are not always able to directly connect to the backend of a database system and sometimes they're limited to exports of the data or they receive files that are in Excel format or CSV. I would refer to these as flat files and they're disconnected from the data. So what do I mean by flat or disconnected data? You're not directly connected to the system that houses that data which means when the data in the system is updated, your data in that flat file is not updated. You would need another file to capture those data changes. CSV common flat files. CSV stands for comma separated values. With a CSV it's a delimited file, and the comma serves as the delimiter. What that delimiter does is separates each of the columns from each other. There's also other types like tab delimited or fixed width, which isn't a delimiter but an amount of space. I've always had more CSV or tab delimited than any other style. And by default CSV files open in Excel. All too often, I see…
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