Luke from TerminusDB here - we've been building automatic import and versioning features for CSVs over the last number of months. Just went into canary release

Luke from TerminusDB here - we've been building automatic import and versioning features for CSVs over the last number of months. Just went into canary release actually. Agree very strongly with the benefits and problems of CSVs in the article. CSVs are crazy flexible and if you are a team with a high velocity of changes and experiments with data, then it can make your life easier to work with CSVs (versus the other options). Terminus is a straight-up open source graph database with revision control at the core. We noticed the CSV (and at best append to Git) problem when we were developing the solution. Loads of teams (irl) use CSVs + email for the storage and distribution of data (and features). What happens is: Data versioning is required but not uniformly specified or facilitated. It ends up being a suffix on a file, rather than a proper version-controlled system as is now common with Code. Data communication is undertaken by sending large files via slack or e-mail. This means multiple inconsistent versions can float around the team without any visibility to project managers, and without any assurance that what you have is the latest version. (As per the article and some comments) CSVs contain no type information, so information is routinely marshaled into and out of formats leading to extra “cleaning” time and hard to find errors (NaNs) which may not even appear in the final feature selection. Apparently 'best practice' is to put all changes back into the data warehouse, but the reality is a 'shadow data' economy within enterprise and an open CSV economy in startups. We are all about bridging those worlds. Give you a GitHub-like way to manage your CSVs so they are version controlled and give the team the ability to see who is making changes. The ability to work offline and then sync up later (like pushing in Git) is a really important aspect. Can really help with CSV problems (we know as first thing we did was shove all our CSVs into TerminusHub).