Formatting Data Files

When you use the HAWQ tools for loading and unloading data, you must specify how your data is formatted. COPY, CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE,and hawq load have clauses that allow you to specify how your data is formatted. Data can be delimited text (TEXT) or comma separated values (CSV) format. External data must be formatted correctly to be read by HAWQ. This topic explains the format of data files expected by HAWQ.

• Formatting Rows

• Formatting Columns

• Representing NULL Values

• Escaping

• Character Encoding