Working with Tabular Data

It's quite common that when you first get your hands on a dataset, it will be in a format that resembles a table. Tables are a straightforward format to use when cleaning data in preparation for more complicated data analysis, and the SFrame is the tabular data structure included with Turi Create. The SFrame is designed to scale to datasets much larger than will fit in memory.

We will introduce the basics of the SFrame in the following chapters:

• SFrames focuses on creating an SFrame from existing data in CSV format and how to persist an SFrame.

• The SFrame supports a large number of common data manipulation operations and we will review a number of common ones in the chapter Data Manipulation.

• The chapter about SQL databases explains how to interface with relational data sources through Python DBAPI2 or ODBC.