[byroot]

I'm not talking about parsing. It's a mess in it's own right of course (encoding, line terminators, etc as others mentioned).

I'm talking about the actual conversion from tabular data to relational. Most of the applications I've worked on had this in one form or another.

So you end up with users downloading an export of their data in CSV, editing it in Excel in various ways, and then reimporting it in the application.

Every company I worked for, this kind of feature was always in the top 3 in term of support load.

[johnnyhillbilly]

"Relational" means "tabular". (A "relation" in relational theory is a table with a name, fields with names and types, and the data in the table.)

A "relationship" in an ER diagram maps to a "reference" in relational theory. This is part of the type safety/domain system of RDBMSs.

If these concepts are muddled, SQL will never quite make sense :)

[dragonwriter]

> "Relational" means "tabular".

Relational database can be expressed in tabular form, but tabular data is not necessarily relational.

> (A "relation" in relational theory is a table with a name, fields with names and types, and the data in the table.)

A relation is a system of one or more functions (in the mathematical sense) each of which has a domain that is a candidate key of the relation and a range that is the composite of the non-key attributes.

[johnnyhillbilly]

Interesting definition. Do you have a source for it. It seems ambiguous.

From the Wikipedia article on relational databases, subsection relational model. "This model organizes data into one or more tables (or "relations") of columns and rows, with a unique key identifying each row. Rows are also called records or tuples."

[samwilliams]

Ah right, yes, I can imagine that would be extremely messy!