More and more, people are beginning to realize that they want to be able to share the data from one of these applications to another. Or, they want to be able to move their application data from an OLTP to an environment more conducive for reporting. After all, reporting on your OLTP will slow down your application, especially if you have a very large dataset and you are doing some pretty heavy analytical reporting making use of some high cpu utilization aggregate functions. But what's the best way to get the data from one application to another? Great question. If you are from generation next, then you're first answer will probably be to export it to an XML file. And XML is great for sharing data from one application to another. But what if you're talking about millions of rows of data? Do you really want to expound on that by adding trillions of extra characters just for the markup? No. unless you've got enough money to purchase a fast ETL tool like Informatica or you are already using SQL server with it's built in DTS, then your best bet is probably still going to be csv files. Their easily zip-able, quick to move, and recognized by just about any application on the planet. Yeah, I'm sure you were hoping for a more eloquent solution, but the fact remains that CVSs are still the fastest and easiest way to move large amounts of data from one place to another.