I raise you thousands of gzipped files (total > 20GB) combined into one dataframe. Frankly, my work laptop did not like it all that much. But most basic operations still worked fine tho
Yeah, it was just a simple example. Although using just pandas (without something like dask) for loading terabytes of data at once into a single dataframe may not be the best idea, even with enough memory.
What do you mean not optimal? This is quite literally the most popular format for any serious data handling and exchange. One byte per separator and newline is all you need. It is not compressed so allows you to stream as well. If you don't need tree structure it is massively better than others
I think portability and easy parsing is the only advantage od CSV. It's definitely good enough (maybe even the best) for small datasets but if you have a lot of data you need a compressed binary format, something like parquet.
But which separator is it, and which line ending? ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 or something else? What about quoting separators and line endings? Yes, there is an RFC, but a million programs were made before the RFC and won't change their ways now.
Have you heard that there are great serialised file formats like .parquet from appache arrow, that can easily be used in typical data science packages like duckdb or polars. Perhaps it even works with pandas (although do not know it that well. I avoid pandas as much as possible as someone who comes from the R tidyverse and try to use polars more when I work in python, because it often feels more intuitive to work with for me.)
It really depends on the machine that is running the code. Pandas will always have the entire thing loaded in memory, and while 600Mb is not a concern for our modern laptops running a single analysis at a time, it can get really messy if the person is not thinking about hardware limitations
CSV are a cool concept. Not so much any standard but rather a text doc where values are separated by commas. Sometimes banks use them and its hell to format them for Excel. Sometimes its just a list of readable words and values.
I had to build a Twitch Bot to add banned words in a CSV to a black list a while back, wish they would just let you copy paste like YT does.