>>jdemle+(OP)
I guess these are quite slow (because no indexing) once you have a serious number of records? That in itself isn't a problem as long as you understand the scope of the project. I wonder why they didn't use (a well-defined subset of) CSV as the format however.
>>rwmj+vp
CSV locks you to the same fields per data entry, that makes it a little less flexible. Plus one of the appeals for me is readability of the raw data; CSV gets long and thin very quickly. Granted each will best suit a certain type of data.