Hacker News Reader

Comment by karteum | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people keep using CSV today while SQLite is MIT-licenced and can be used everywhere, has a very portable and lightweight implementation, has a stable file format with long-term commitment, and a good compromise on the type system that gives enough flexibility to be on par with CSV if some entries happen to have a different type...

View on HN

Are you suggesting sending around SQLite dbs as a data interchange format? Or to replace some other csv use case?

Yes exactly. As a data interchange format I think it is much better than CSV (more compact, faster, more efficient, less error-prone, etc.)

Installed base. You can bet there are thousands of AS/400s and similar architectures putting out CSVs. Also you cant get more lightweight than CSV, i have several microcontroller projects that output CSV.

Switch from the developer world to the business world and everybody has Excel to open the CSV files with the article information, the sales numbers and so on and can work with that. How do you even read data from SQLite to Excel? VBA? Some obscure connector? With CSV it's "import" or even "open file".

Ironically Excels implementation of CSV is terrible. It’s constantly destroying data (eg large numeric and pseudo-numeric fields) not to mention the whole issue around any cell bringing with an equal symbol being converted into a function.

It totally is, but that is was most people know, next to the XLS/XLSX files themselves.

And some localizations of excel uses semi colon instead of comma! So no interoperability.

Haha. Wait to see when you receive a file made in a different language ( for example an excel file with formulas created on a japanese language computer).

Sqlite has an odbc driver that excel can use

Because if I want to do a graph from some data, it's much much easier to open the csv in Excel (or LO Calc) and create a graph from a sum of the subset of three columns VS a fourth column than it use to write an SQL query.

Does Excel support SQL? Because I feel confident that Excel+SQL would 100% replace Tableau and save us a million dollars

You have been able to include the results of sql queries in excel for decades.

Plus Excel includes PowerQuery with the M programming language which lets you do everything you can in SQL, just slower and with more verbosity.

Excel can't open SQLlite files

Yes it can, using the sqlite odbc driver.

Does that work with File > Open with a stock Excel install? Does editing work seamlessly?

No, but that's not why you would move your data to sqlite. I was only responding to the question of whether Excel could read it, which it can.

He said open, not read. They're subtly different terms but the distinction is important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com