[science-iwg] tools for data import

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question:

I'm working with some non-profits that are interested in doing analyses 
on datasets from a number of sources...e.g. certainly sql dbs, nosql 
dbs, but also lots of data sources that are represented as csv 
files/simple tables.    A tedious and time-consuming reality is that 
since these are from different orgs, these csv files are not formatted 
the same way (wrt missing values, column types, delimiters, encoding, 
etc) that it's often necessary to do a fair amount of trivial 
'massaging' of the data so that it can be imported into a db.

I've been working with Python and Pandas csv library, but I'm curious 
what tools/tooling folks are using or recommend for similar kinds of 
data import problems.

Thanksinadvance,

Scott