Upload files

For every user, columns provides cloud storage to store uploaded data files under each user's namespace in the secure cloud storage. Once a data is uploaded and a data connection is created, you can run analyze and visualize your data from there.

Today, Columns supports CSV/TSV files only.

Compressed CSV/TSV

Do you have a large CSV file? Sure, sometimes we work with large files, large files takes long time to upload, and it takes long time for Columns load it up too! So we support compressed CSV/TSV file using GZIP, because CSV/TSV are usually highly compressiable, you may see 20x or 30x size reduction, and it speeds up everything. Also it saves your storage quota as well.

For example, I had a 500MB CSV file, after compression, it's only 20MB, that is 25x reduction ratio. To make things simple, please just run gzip command on your file, it will keep the original extension .csv or .tsv in output file name, that is how we can tell if it is CSV or TSV with a compressed file.

Here is a simple example, assume large.csv is 1GB in size

gzip large.csv output: large.csv.gz

Now, you only need to upload this large.csv.gz, Columns handles the rest. We recommend you compress your file before uploading it when the raw size is larger than 50MB. Enjoy the speed and use less storage space!