Man, if I had a dollar for every time data roundtripping to files has corrupted things I'd have many dollars. The schema-based serialization libraries (Thrift,

Man, if I had a dollar for every time data roundtripping to files has corrupted things I'd have many dollars. The schema-based serialization libraries (Thrift, Protobufs) or MsgPack are a good way to avoid that too. They come with a lot less baggage than say HDF5. Also, if efficiency isn't paramount -- just use SQLite! Amazing tool when it's in its sweetspot. Lots of tradeoffs when dealing w/ serialization and file formats, no easy answers.