Encodings

DBN

Databento Binary Encoding (DBN) is an extremely fast message encoding and highly-compressible storage format for normalized market data. It includes a self-describing metadata header and adopts a binary format with zero-copy serialization.

We recommend using our Python, C++, or Rust client libraries to read DBN files locally. A CLI tool is also available for converting DBN files to CSV or JSON.

CSV

Comma-separated values (CSV) is a simple text file format for tabular data, CSVs can be easily opened with Excel, loaded into pandas data frames, or parsed in C++.

Our CSVs have one header line, followed by one record per line. Lines use UNIX-style \n separators.

JSON

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a flexible text file format with broad language support and wide adoption across web apps.

Our JSON files follow the JSON lines specification, where each line of the file is a JSON record. Lines use UNIX-style \n separators.