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 never managed to find a satisfying answer to my question, but I did at least find a solution to my toy problem using uniqs "-f" option, which I had been unaware of:

cat animals.txt | sort -t " " -k1,1 -k2,2nr \
| awk -F' ' '{print $2, " ", $1}' | uniq -f 1

The awk portion above could, obviously, be skipped entirely if the input file were created with columns in the opposite order.

I'm still holding out hope for a SQL-like tool, though.