Is there a recommended file format for flat file s...
# ask-community
a
Is there a recommended file format for flat file storage created from a DataFrame? The data may have mixed data types including arrays stored as a value. In the past I've had trouble with complex data types using
feather
format and sometimes ran into errors with
HDF
as well
m
Hello Alex! Prefect is data format agnostic, and you can use any data types. I personally never used feather, but let's see if community has something to share.
k
Hey @Alex Furrier, Mariia is right that Prefect is data format agnostic. Mixed types are generally hard to deal with and I think that you will probably run into errors with
feather
because Apache Arrow is strongly typed. If you want to force this, you can turn that column into a binary blob and then use
feather
. When you load it and put it in pandas, by unpickling, I think it will work.
d
For tabular data Parquet is a very good option.
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