I used to work somewhere that did a lot of ETL and we used MS databases - mainly, ahem, Access. At the time I had no idea about *nix. I've often thought since how much easier and quicker it would be to solve lots of the processing jobs with this sort of thing, but never thought about implementation details. This is a great reminder that new is not always best and reminds me that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

That guy's problem set allowed him to filter out massive percentages of his data from the get go.

Wow thanks! I couldn't find it in search :-) glad you found it.