The world of data
In today's digitally driven world, data is being generated at an ever-increasing pace. The World Economic Forum reports that, by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally. An exabyte is a 1 followed by 18 zeros. That is just a little less than 5,359 TB per second, or 5.3 million GB per second. Unsurprisingly, not all of this data is in the form of simple text files. While CSV files are very common and highly useful, they are just one of the many possible data formats we may want to work with while using pandas. In this chapter, we will explore more options to bring data into pandas DataFrames and Series, and store data back in memory. Such data operations are called input/output or I/O operations. For example, data from your finance team might be from software such as SAS or Stata. Furthermore, if you work with "big data," you may need to access Parquet or HDF data. Depending on your business requirements and the complexity of the...