The storage engine docs are quite clear — “the CSV storage engine stores data in text files using comma-separated values format” — and yet I never realized MySQL supported it.
Sure, the tables don’t support indexes and repairing them seems riskier than with other tables, but it still seems to offer a lot of convenience for some things. A comment in the docs suggests how easy CSV exports can be:
A comment suggests this super easy export to CSV approach:
CREATE TABLE csvtable SELECT * FROM innodbtable;
ALTER TABLE csvtable ENGINE=CSV;
That said, I really can’t imagine using it in production, or even as part of a repeated workflow.