# Acquire operations

Operations that read the data in, from files, databases and the web: each makes a new table from no input table. The sources include files in formats such as CSV, JSON, Parquet and Excel, archives and folders, databases, cloud storage, web addresses and applications' APIs, and a table can also be generated, typed in or pasted from the clipboard.

Page: <https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/acquire>

## A new table, from no input table

- [Unpack an archive](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/unpack-an-archive): Decompress or unpack zip, tar, gzip (Not built yet)
- [Read from a database](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-from-a-database): Read from a relational or NoSQL database, warehouse or lake (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Read a file of any format](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-a-file-of-any-format): One reader that picks the format from the file (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Read a columnar file](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-a-columnar-file): Read Parquet, ORC, Avro, Arrow, Iceberg, Delta (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Read a CSV or delimited file](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-a-csv-or-delimited-file): Read CSV, TSV, fixed-width, other delimited text (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Read a JSON file](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-a-json-file): Read JSON, NDJSON (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Read another file format](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-another-file-format): Read any other file format (SAS, SPSS, Stata, PDF, YAML, logs) (Not built yet)
- [Read a spreadsheet](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-a-spreadsheet): Read Excel, ODS, Google Sheets (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Read an XML or HTML file](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-an-xml-or-html-file): Read XML, HTML tables (Runs as a SQL step)
- [List files and folders](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/list-files-and-folders): List directories, file metadata, file exists (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Generate rows](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/generate-rows): Generate rows: sequences, date ranges, constants, typed-in data (Runs as a SQL step)
- [Fetch from the web](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/fetch-from-the-web): HTTP GET or POST, REST, SOAP, GraphQL, web scraping (Not built yet)
- [Paste in a table](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/paste-in-a-table): Take a table from memory or the clipboard (Not built yet)
- [Fetch from cloud storage](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/fetch-from-cloud-storage): List or fetch from S3, GCS, Azure Blob, HDFS, FTP, SFTP (Not built yet)
- [Read from an application's API](https://meridian.online/docs/arcform/operations/read-from-an-applications-api): Read from a SaaS application API (Not built yet)