Which one is best CSV or JSON in order to import big data (PHP) [closed]

Question

I'm trying to get a big number of data (about 3M rows) and I have only two options to do that.

1. Call an API then recover the 3M JSON objects.
2. Import a CSV file containing the 3M rows.

I didn't test any of these solutions yet to tell which one is best in terms of speed.

Answer 1

If you want to retrieve simple data as lists or rows with some columns the option #2 is the good one, you can read below a set of advantages and disadvantages:

Pros

• Less bandwidth needed because JSON needs more syntax characters to keep the format while CSV is as simple as use a character separator
• Process data is faster because only needs to split by the separator character while JSON needs to interpret the syntax
• Big data technology as Hadoop has an integrated parse for CSV format while needs a specific function for parse JSON (for example using Hive language).

Cons

• Unstructured data and more difficult to be read by humans
• You have to take care as separator character cannot appear in data fields.

If the data will contain complex data as tuples, arrays and structures JSON are better because:

• Keeps a clear and structured format
• Doesn't repeat data to reference it because one label could contain multiple data.