Data appears in different shapes and sizes. It can be anything like text, multimedia, research data, numerical data, or any other type of data too. Whenever it comes down to choosing a data format, there are plenty of things that one needs to consider, like the characteristics of the data, infrastructure of the projects, several use case scenarios, and also the size of the data. There are three different data formats: 1. Database Connections 2. Directory-based Data Format 3. File-based Data Format Every data format is handled in a different way, with each of them being used for different purposes.