Recommendations: Querying CSV / Database??

[ironfelix717]

Hi,

I have an application already built in VBA for Access that does data visualization on a user imported CSV files.
Its kind of boggy and slow. The graphing is poor.

I am thinking of rebuilding in Python. The fact that my project demands query-ability almost makes the idea of converting to python silly. I don't know anything about using DBs in Python and feel like its just going to be more work than keeping it in Access/VBA.

All i need to do is be able to query the CSV file and get the data quickly so I can put each column into graphs/etc.

What is the easiest solution for achieving this? How would you approach?


Regards --

[DPaul]

Hi,

If your source data is in csv you could:
a) Quick & dirty : open it in excel, and save as an XML database
b) Better: use one of at least 5 packages to read the csv and turn it into an XML database.
I use ElementTree, but purists will use something like beautifulsoup.
Now you have a databse you can query ("findall", with wildcarding etc..)
c) Graphics: use one of a zillion python packages available.

Dpaul

[ndc85430]

I don't see the need for the extra complexity of turning CSV into XML here. Why not just read from the CSV with pandas and use its features for selecting data? Then you can visualise those things with matplotlib, etc.