Of course you don't want to use a hammer to dig a hole. Picking the right tool for the job is necessary regardless of what line of work you're in. With that be

Of course you don't want to use a hammer to dig a hole. Picking the right tool for the job is necessary regardless of what line of work you're in. With that being said, you can accomplish some pretty interesting things if you think outside the box a little bit. I wrote a small application to perform an ETL between various data sources (MySQL, an old version of MSSQL, various third party API's, CSVs). I populate a queue and spawn up as many PHP processes as I want/need (php -f /thread.php {$id}) and each one runs on their own, grabbing an item from the queue, processing it, then grabbing another one. Currently I run about 64 of these "threads" at a time with no issues, which allows me to sync a few million records relatively quickly. Best tool for the job? No. Does it work? Hell yeah. Had I tried to learn a new language to get this done I probably never would have finished it or it would be way harder for me to maintain/debug in a language I'm not familiar with or use often enough to efficiently troubleshoot when something comes up weeks/months/years down the road.