Getting Started

This documentation describes a database called "comma-separated value store" or csvs.

The goal of csvs is to be accessible and approachable. An engineer should be able to write a csvs library in an evening, and a child should be able to glean the contents of the database by inspecting them with a text reader. A dataset should contain valuable data even after corruption and be easy to repair. Such transparency and naïvetee are of higher priority than processing and memory efficiency.

A csvs dataset is a directory that contains plain text files in the "comma-separated value" format, or CSV. Any directory that contains a .csvs.csv file is a valid CSVS dataset. Each CSV file represents a table with two columns and is called a "tablet". The first column is a key, and the second column is a value. You can store records by appending lines to the tablets. To represent complex objects and connect the tablets to each other, specify the relationships between values in the schema file _-_.csv.

Here's an example of the simplest CSVS dataset that contains a record about visiting Japan in 2001.

.csvs.csv

csvs,0.0.2

_-_.csv

event,date

event-date.csv

visited-japan,2001-01-01

To learn more about csvs, see the Tutorial and the User guides.