| Larping as a dba now, and trust me many of us do know, and its a source of ongoing suffering, but we're often not developers and don't necessarily have the choice of tooling. Right now the DB I'm paid to babysit provides cli tools that flip between tabular and k/v list output without making that configurable, or a tabular form that doesn't include headers, or a 3rd party tool that will, but has the spectacularly annoying "error on line 1 : multi-line query" issue. Or things that are slow or only talk via generic protocols like odbc etc etc etc I think you're being a little unfair about the pipe delimited thing though, it's a least worst compromise based on who we're providing the data too - non technical business people, the vast majority of whom use excel or similar tools and couldn't even tell you what "data format" means, let alone configure their systems to parse something else. Personally I had a bit of an epiphany around the ascii delimiters (us/fs/rs/gs) which work extremely well when the data is ascii/utf-8, and make data interchange between shell cli tools very easy. But they've also invisible and little business software supports them in a friendly way. Telling someone in accounts or market to "use octal 034" helps no one. And I've resigned myself to using multiple tools, dev with tool 1 with decent error messages, tool 2 for production use because it can actually produce sane output formats. What I don't have a choice on is which db we use, and it's not modern or cool and honest most things don't even have drivers for it |