Plain text where a chosen separator character divides fields and a terminator closes every row; CSV, TSV and fixed-width files are common forms. Good for structured data that many programs need to read.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Delimited text in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- WHERE
Limits a SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE to just the rows meeting a condition. Omit it, and the statement hits every row.
- Cluster Shared Volumes
Shared failover cluster storage that all nodes write to simultaneously, typically for Scale-Out File Server or Hyper-V. On SAN-backed storage, ReFS-formatted volumes work in redirected mode.
- TSV
Tab-separated values: a delimited text format similar to CSV but using a tab character between fields.
- Structured data
Every record has the same fields, because the data must fit a schema fixed before storage; relational tables are its usual home.
- CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
Related terms
- Direct copy
Loading a Fabric warehouse by having the Copy activity call the COPY statement straight against Parquet or delimited text files held in Azure Blob Storage or ADLS Gen2, with no intermediate step. If the format or settings aren't supported, staged copy has to be used instead.
- Open mirroring
A mirroring approach where an application or third-party tool of any kind uploads its changes as Parquet or delimited text files, plus a _metadata.json file that identifies the keys, to the landing zone of a mirrored database in OneLake. Fabric applies those inserts, updates and deletes to Delta tables on its side.
- PATH
Parent-child hierarchies in DAX rely on this function. For each row it builds one delimited text value listing the IDs of the row's ancestors, top level first and ending with the row's own ID, which PATHITEM, PATHLENGTH and friends can then pick apart.
- Text/CSV connector
Preferred over the Excel connector for CSV files, this Power Query connector reads .csv and other delimited text, detecting the delimiter and column types, by default from the first 200 rows.