Datatable

Rows and columns.

Datatable is the most common data type used in Data-flo. It represents tabular data, comprising rows and columns in a grid-like format.

It is primarily used when working with .csv, .tsv, .xlsx and .text files, as well as data from a database.

There is always a header row containing column names, with no extra header content above that. TIP: to fix headers that don't meet this constraint, see Fixing datatable headers.

Ideally, for simplicity, the datatable would contain one column that contains unique row identifiers (a.k.a. the primary key), but this is not technically required. TIP: how to create a single-column unique row ID, see There's no single-column unique row ID.

The Data-flo datatable is very similar to data science things like python pandas package or R dataframes, as well as similar to spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets.

Example

The csv-to-datatable adaptor turns delimited values into a datatable with columns and rows.

Data output of csv-to-datatable argument