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Ask HN: Universal format for storing data, untied to specific schemas?

2 points by rambojazz ↗ HN
Is there a way to store data in a file that is "schema agnostic"? In other way, a format that is not tied to "relationships" or "graphs" or whatever other schema. I'm thinking of a storage format that is just concerned with storing data and that can be easily loaded to a RDBMS or a graph databases as needed (or other database schemas that might exist).

5 comments

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brudgers
If there is not a schema, there is no easy way to put the data into an RDBMS because the data must be encoded in that databases schema.
adamhp
I'm kind of scratching my head at this. Typically, for data to be useful, there needs to be some dimensionality to the data and a way to make sense of it. There's really no way to escape the underlying structure of the data if you want it to be useful.

Can you elaborate a bit on some example use cases?

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Someone
If you need links between items, which you probably will, you need a graph.

The most agnostic scheme for that I know of is RDF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework)

IMO, its main advantage over committing to a specific SQL schema is that it can be used to produce PhD’s (yes, it would be cool if the store could figure out that its more efficient by a mile to store first and last names together, or that the typical queries run on the system would be zillion times faster if it had an index on user ID, but over half a century of research hasn’t gotten us there for SQL databases, so making that (somewhat) work if we give the system even less information is serious work)