Database

MXF is the SMPTE-standardized professional container format for broadcast and post-production, designed for interoperable exchange of video, audio, and metadata between systems.

Newline-Delimited JSON — a text format with one JSON object per line, designed for streaming, logging, and processing large datasets line-by-line.

Apple

The OBJ 3D model format — a simple, human-readable text format for 3D geometry with broad support across modeling, rendering, and game development tools.

The open standard spreadsheet format from the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) family, used by LibreOffice Calc, Apache OpenOffice, and other applications for spreadsheet documents.

The open standard document format from the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) family, used by LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice, and other applications for word processing documents.

An open-source, royalty-free lossy audio codec in the Ogg container, offering quality comparable to or better than MP3 without patent restrictions.

A modern, open-source, royalty-free audio codec excelling at both speech and music across a wide bitrate range, with ultra-low latency for real-time communication.

The OpenType font format — the modern standard for digital typography, extending TrueType with PostScript outlines, advanced layout features, and cross-platform support.

Apple

Apache Parquet columnar storage format — a highly efficient binary format for analytics workloads, supporting compression and encoding optimizations.

Adobe

PNG is a lossless compressed raster image format with full alpha transparency support, widely used for web graphics, screenshots, and images requiring exact pixel reproduction.

The modern Microsoft PowerPoint presentation format based on Open XML, storing slides, layouts, themes, animations, and media in a ZIP-compressed package of XML files.

Apple ProRes is a family of lossy and visually lossless video codecs designed for high-quality professional video editing, post-production, and broadcast delivery.

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) — Google

PSD is Adobe Photoshop's native file format, preserving layers, masks, blend modes, adjustment layers, smart objects, and all editing data for non-destructive professional image editing workflows.

QOI (Quite OK Image Format) is a simple, fast lossless image format designed for speed over compression ratio, encoding and decoding images 20-50x faster than PNG with comparable file sizes.

The RAR archive format — proprietary compression with strong encryption, recovery records, and multi-volume splitting for high-ratio archiving.

RAW files contain minimally processed sensor data from digital cameras, preserving maximum detail, dynamic range, and editing flexibility for professional photography workflows.

The RPM package format — Red Hat

A Microsoft-developed text-based document interchange format that encodes formatted text with control words, providing cross-platform rich text exchange without binary complexity.

Structured Query Language files — text files containing database queries for schema definition, data manipulation, migrations, and seed data.

SQLite single-file relational database — a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration SQL database engine stored as a single cross-platform file.

The STEP file format — the ISO standard for exchanging complete CAD product data including 3D geometry, tolerances, materials, and assembly structure across engineering tools.

The STL 3D model format — the standard for 3D printing, representing surface geometry as a mesh of triangles in either ASCII or binary encoding.

SVG is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics that scales to any resolution without quality loss, supporting interactivity, animation, and CSS styling.

The TAR archive format — Unix/Linux standard for bundling files while preserving permissions, ownership, and symlinks, typically paired with a compression layer.

TGA (Targa) is a raster image format supporting alpha channels and simple compression, historically important in game development and video production, still used in game asset pipelines.

TIFF is a flexible, high-quality raster image format widely used in professional photography, print production, and scientific imaging, supporting multiple compression methods, color spaces, and high bit depths.

Tom

A plain-text tabular data format using tab characters as field delimiters, avoiding the quoting complexities of CSV and widely used in bioinformatics, linguistics, and data processing.

The TrueType font format — Apple and Microsoft

The simplest document format — unformatted text encoded in character sets like UTF-8, ASCII, or Latin-1, readable by virtually every computing device and application.

The USDZ format — Apple

Variable fonts — a single font file containing a continuous range of styles (weight, width, slant, optical size) controlled by design axes, replacing entire font families.

vCard (.vcf) contact format — the universal standard (RFC 6350) for exchanging electronic business card and contact information between applications.

WebAssembly (Wasm) binary format — a portable, high-performance binary instruction format for running compiled code in browsers and server-side runtimes.

The standard uncompressed audio format for Windows, storing raw PCM audio data with full fidelity for professional editing and archival.

WebM is an open, royalty-free multimedia container format developed by Google for the web, using VP8, VP9, or AV1 video with Vorbis or Opus audio.

WebP is a modern image format developed by Google that provides both lossy and lossless compression with alpha transparency and animation, offering smaller file sizes than JPEG and PNG for web delivery.

Microsoft

WMV is Microsoft

The WOFF and WOFF2 web font formats — compressed font containers optimized for efficient web delivery, enabling custom typography on websites with smaller file sizes.

XCF is the native file format for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), preserving layers, channels, paths, and all editing data for non-destructive raster image editing in the open-source ecosystem.

The legacy binary spreadsheet format used by Microsoft Excel from 1997 through 2003, storing worksheets, formulas, and formatting in an OLE2 compound file structure.

The modern Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format based on Open XML, storing worksheets, formulas, charts, pivot tables, and formatting in a ZIP-compressed package of XML files.

Extensible Markup Language — a verbose but powerful structured data format widely used in enterprise systems, document formats, and legacy APIs.

The XZ compression format — high-ratio single-stream compression using LZMA2, the modern standard for software distribution as tar.xz on Linux.

YAML Ain

The ZIP archive format — structure, creation, extraction, encryption, and cross-platform compatibility for the most widely used compressed archive format.

The Zstandard (zstd) compression format — Facebook

Master the strategies and techniques for safeguarding database integrity and ensuring business continuity through robust backup and recovery plans. Activate this skill when designing disaster recovery protocols, responding to data loss incidents, planning major system migrations, or optimizing data resilience for critical applications.

Implement and manage various caching strategies to reduce database load, improve application response times, and enhance scalability. Activate this skill when encountering high database latency, excessive database queries, slow user interfaces, or when optimizing for read-heavy workloads and cost efficiency.

Configure and manage database connection pools to maximize throughput, minimize latency, and prevent resource exhaustion. Activate this skill when applications experience connection timeouts, database "too many connections" errors, high connection churn, or when tuning application-to-database resource utilization.

Design and structure data for databases to ensure integrity, optimize performance, and support business logic effectively. Activate this skill when initiating new database projects, refactoring existing schemas, troubleshooting data consistency issues, or when planning for future application scalability and data evolution.

Harden database systems against unauthorized access, data breaches, and service disruption by implementing robust security controls. Activate this skill when designing new data infrastructure, auditing existing systems, responding to security incidents, or establishing a comprehensive data governance framework.

Implement and optimize full-text search capabilities in databases to provide fast, relevant, and natural language-aware retrieval of information. Activate this skill when simple `LIKE` queries are insufficient for search accuracy, performance, or when dealing with large volumes of text data requiring nuanced relevance ranking and language processing.

Design, implement, and query graph databases to effectively model and analyze highly connected data. Activate this skill when your data's relationships are as important as the data itself, requiring complex traversals, pathfinding, or network analysis that is cumbersome in relational systems.

Optimize database query performance by understanding, designing, and implementing effective indexing strategies. Activate this skill when encountering slow queries, designing new database tables, or performing database refactoring for performance enhancements.