You're executing a big import job that fails on a few items, so you want to go back and parse out the IDs of those items, transform them into an SQL command and

You're executing a big import job that fails on a few items, so you want to go back and parse out the IDs of those items, transform them into an SQL command and look up the data in the database to poke about at what's wrong. This is trivially few operations in Emacs when you're running your shell and SQL client side-by-side and have brilliant regex and text manipulation tools in the middle. Sure, you could do this just on the command line if you'd logged to a file and could do the sed or awk bit in the middle to pipe a command to psql etc, but why bother? Doing it inside your editor is so much more forgiving.