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Comment by csmithuk | Hacker News Reader

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csmithuk·

Surprisingly, we've been doing this on the Microsoft side of things for years with ADO and csv data sources!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974559.aspx

(article dated 2004)

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Even better is LogParser, which lets you do SQL queries against just about any data format you'll find in a file on Windows. It's been around for a decade and continues to be improved.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/dd919274.asp...

Microsoft LogParser is not only an established utility, it's extremely fast, too.

I remember LogParser from years back. I used to be very involved in that nascent community, and I developed a plugin for it that let you parse an input file using a regex with capture groups so you could use SQL queries on log files that did not have records with simple delimited columns.

Even older, the ODBC text driver for Windows 3.1x supported this, 20 years ago: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/146220

Apropo of absolutely nothing, my advanced C++ final was a basic console CRUD application using ADO. It was a nightmare - fun, and I broke the database (and didn't get points for that) but a nightmare.

I'm so glad C# is a thing now.

For SQL Server OPENDATASOURCE and OPENQUERY can do the trick too

One can use Oracle "external tables" with delimited files; they are only so flexible, though, and you want to think hard about security.

NeXT DBKit, 1992 or so, had a CSV adapter as well.

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