Comment by pvitz
4 days ago
A big software for simulating the economic balance sheets of life insurance companies moved many years ago from using FoxPro under the hood to CSV files and sold it as a huge improvement. I don't think anybody was convinced by that, but vendor lock-in makes companies accept such regressions.
I was on a project trying to migrate off Oracle and they wanted to just dump all historic data to CSVs.
I pointed out they'd lose a lot of the integrity and audit features built into a database.
I get wanting to be free from Oracle but go to another database.
I wonder how that happened.
Maybe someone proposed Postgres and they said well who is going to support it. And then they'd have to pay some company to show they have postgres support anyway.
CSV has no support.
I once worked on maintaining an accounting package that exported to csv. At one point there was a bug where if the notation for a transaction included a single unmatched quote, the rest of the exported data silently disappeared.
The depressing part wasn’t finding this bug (in a very mature codebase), it was painstakingly explaining what the problem was and how to fix it.