1. What size limits/practical constraints are there on freezefiles (and accompanying JSON files)?
2. Are there any code samples for consuming freezefiles, or should I just assume it's simple JSON/YML parsing?
3. Has there been any thought in using this to expose database contents via static REST API?
Final thought: this seems like a great step towards solving the age-old version controlling data problem.
As for 1.: CSV files are encoded as a stream, so they can be as large as needed. JSON is dumped as a whole from memory, I'd be keen to see if someone has written a streaming JSON encoder.
2.: Consuming, no. I normally load them in a browser with D3 or jQuery to feed them into a graphic or other interface.
3.: I'd argue this is out of scope for dataset, but simpler REST API makers would definietly be cool. Check https://github.com/okfn/webstore - this is what dataset came out of, and it makes somewhat RESTish APIs.
This looks interesting: https://gist.github.com/akaihola/1415730
Edit: dataset looks like a really interesting library!
From what I can read, it seems that this cool looking tool allows you to use SQL as a kind of object free data store, maybe not unlike a NoSQL DB python wrapper (freeing you from first defining your models, and then ensuring that the SQLAlchemy functions have updated your DB).