Supported Data File Formats

Important Nexla Help Center Update:

Nexla's Zendesk Help Center pages are being deprecated and will soon no longer be available.

Nexla Documentation is now the home for Nexla's User Guides, with improved formatting and categories that are easier to navigate, providing a better overall user experience.

Please update any bookmarks to the new Nexla Documentation site (docs.nexla.com/user-guides).

_______________________________________________

By default Nexla automatically detects file formats that it ingests so most users will not have to worry about input file type. In the Advanced Settings panel when adding an ingestion source, under Data Format the default setting is Automatically Detect Format, which will work with any filetypes including Avro, Parquet, CSV, EDI, Excel, JSON, ORC, TSV, XML, etc. even if there are multiple file types in the source folder. With this default setting Nexla also supports:

• Fixed length files
• Compressed files (GZIP, ZIP, tar.gz)
• Spreadsheets (Excel, Google Sheets)

For specialized use cases, users can force the data format read to a specific file type. The currently supported Data Format settings are:

• AVRO
• EDI
• JSON
• Log Files
• ORC
• Parquet
• XML
• Custom Text File - can be used to support arbitrary delimited files like pipe separated, caret separated, or any other character separated

Usually however, users should not have to manually set a file type to read and Nexla supports all file types from any source. As soon as a source is added, Nexla will organize the data into a Nexset data product that does not have a file format but contains a complete understanding of the data regardless of format.

Bring your Own Custom File Format

Nexla can easily be extended to work with any custom file format your team uses as well - contact your Nexla account representative for more details.

Related

Convert Data to a Different Format

Advanced Settings for File Based Sources