doesn’t scale well
- demlimited text e.g., CSV TSV
- easy to create and process
- portable
- lowest common denominator
- structured text e.g., JSON, XML, YAML
- many tools for querying and transforming data
- portable also
- Serialiased data Structures (usually binary)
- more compact
- easy to do
- single user only
- no automatic failure recovery
- no querying
- versioning issues
- no standards
- less portable