Editing Comparison of common data file formats (section)

== Quick Comparison Table of Common Formats ==
<table class="wikitable">
    <tr>
        <th>Format</th>
        <th>Hierarchical</th>
        <th>Human-Readable</th>
        <th>Row Count / Size Limit</th>
        <th>Common Issues</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>'''CSV'''</td>
        <td>No (tabular)</td>
        <td>High</td>
        <td>No inherent limit in the format itself; depends on the software used to open it (Excel: ~1.04 million rows)</td>
        <td>Garbled text in non-English characters; newline characters within field values can cause row misalignment; data type coercion (e.g., leading zero in phone numbers gets dropped)</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>'''TSV'''</td>
        <td>No (tabular)</td>
        <td>High</td>
        <td>Same as CSV; no inherent limit in the format itself</td>
        <td>Same issues as CSV, but avoids delimiter misinterpretation when field values contain commas</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>'''Excel'''</td>
        <td>No (tabular)</td>
        <td>High</td>
        <td>Theoretical limit of 1,048,576 rows × 16,384 columns; 32,767 character limit per cell; performance lags once row count exceeds ~100,000</td>
        <td>Long numbers get converted to scientific notation; certain strings get misinterpreted as dates</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>'''JSON'''</td>
        <td>Yes</td>
        <td>Medium</td>
        <td>No inherent row limit in the format itself; the bottleneck is that the entire file must be loaded into memory when read</td>
        <td>Large files (250MB+) are prone to out-of-memory errors; JSONL is recommended for streaming/line-by-line reading instead</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>'''SQLite'''</td>
        <td>No (relational)</td>
        <td>Low (requires a tool to open)</td>
        <td>Theoretical limit of 2⁶⁴ rows, but in practice constrained by the 281 TB database file size limit (roughly 2×10¹³ rows)</td>
        <td>Requires a database tool for reading/writing; not convenient for direct viewing</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>'''Parquet'''</td>
        <td>No (columnar)</td>
        <td>Low (requires a tool to open)</td>
        <td>No theoretical row limit in the format itself (organized by Row Groups, default limit of 1 million rows per group, but a file can contain any number of Row Groups)</td>
        <td>The practical bottleneck is disk space rather than the format itself; there are documented cases of successfully writing 500 million to 1 billion rows</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>'''SQL file'''</td>
        <td>No</td>
        <td>Medium</td>
        <td>No inherent limit as plain text; the limit comes from the tool used to import it</td>
        <td>Text editors can crash or become unresponsive when the file is too large; SQL syntax compatibility issues across different database engines</td>
    </tr>
</table>

'''Recommendations:'''
# Need nested/free-form fields → JSON (use JSONL for large datasets)
# Data exceeds a million rows and you only need to move the data → Parquet or CSV
# Need to restore the full database structure (including relations and indexes) → SQL or SQLite
# General use with spreadsheet software → CSV / Excel