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Comment by jeremysmyth | Hacker News Reader

MySQL has supported CSV as a data source for quite some time: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/csv-storage-engine.ht...

You can run full SQL queries directly against a text file as if it was a table.

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Yeah, and that's how we used to direct customers who wanted upload CSV data. We even wrote some nice tutorials on how to set it up

https://chartio.com/education/databases/excel-to-mysql

But we found that many people either aren't technical enough, or didn't want to go through the hassle of setting up a MySQL instance, defining a schema, and cleaning the data. So now we do that for them.

Good call. I'm a financial analyst who is becoming increasingly comfortable with code in general, but I can tell you 80-90% of business users lose interest as soon as anything SQL comes up. Heck, 70% of business users chicken out if an Access db is involved.

So this should really get a much, much bigger audience to use chartio.

Perl's DBI also has a driver for CSV as the datasource,

https://metacpan.org/module/DBD::CSV

I haven't used it in ages, but Log Parser -- a fantastic old Microsoft skunkworks project -- lets you run full SQL directly against CSV files, Apache logs, the Windows Registry, Active Directory, file paths...

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2465...

Windows only, natch.

Microsoft SQL Server has a couple of methods for querying CSV/XLS(X) files (I remember at least OPENROWSET and BULK INSERT), but sometimes it's a bit tricky to use/configure (have the right OLEDB driver, use INI files for configuration etc..) or the behaviour is not very consistent/well-documented

Edit: of course with BULK INSERT you don't directly query the file, you must load it to a (temp) table

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