I deal with financial data which is in well-defined formats for the various asset classes. You can save a lot of time by just writing some parsing functions to deal with your exact needs and avoid needless work. And, hopefully avoid using the built-in functions for conversions as those will almost always be A LOT slower due to what they're required to handle.
I prefer to store that type of data in csv files because there are times when you need to read through the data to find errors, adhoc analysis, etc....If you're loading those types of files very frequently, there are better formats of course. But, when the parsing time is peanuts compared to the runtime of your program, it's nice to be able to load the file into other programs when you need without having to convert it first.
I deal with financial data which is in well-defined formats for the various asset classes. You can save a lot of time by just writing some parsing functions to deal with your exact needs and avoid needless work. And, hopefully avoid using the built-in functions for conversions as those will almost always be A LOT slower due to what they're required to handle.
I prefer to store that type of data in csv files because there are times when you need to read through the data to find errors, adhoc analysis, etc....If you're loading those types of files very frequently, there are better formats of course. But, when the parsing time is peanuts compared to the runtime of your program, it's nice to be able to load the file into other programs when you need without having to convert it first.