Simple, fast SQL queries for flat files

Question

Does anyone know of any tools to provide simple, fast queries of flat files using a SQL-like declarative query language? I\'d rather not pay the overhead of loading the file in

Answer 1

I wrote TxtSushi mostly to do SQL selects on flat files. Here is the command chain for your example (all of these commands are from TxtSushi):

tabtocsv animals.txt | namecolumns - | tssql -table animals - \
'select col1, max(as_int(col2)) from animals group by col1'

namecolumns is only required because animals.txt doesn't have a header row. You can get a quick sense of what is possible by looking through the example scripts. There are also links to similar tools on the bottom of the main page.