Just catching on: MySQL supports tables in plain CSV

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.