Quite frankly I'd love a programmers dictionary over terms, I recently called a file with a csv like format a db because, well, its not a csv and I don't know what else to call it.
Well that's the problem, it isn't, its a pseudo csv. A simple csv can be done with {awk -F ,} you only have a certain amount of fields separated by ",". field N is ".+". This means you don't need a parser, but it also means the format is variable depending on the headers. but you also can create a simple BRE regex, thus having pretty good performance.
A table?
well, yeah, that's what a csv is but the format is not regular.