I don't doubt that sqlite will wipe the floor with xsv for certain types of analysis. I also suspect that the opposite would be true for other types of analysis

I don't doubt that sqlite will wipe the floor with xsv for certain types of analysis. I also suspect that the opposite would be true for other types of analysis. Although, you'd know much better than I would - I've used sqlite quite a bit while my only usage of xsv was to work with a 100 line CSV file. Xsv was fast, but, I'm sure most tools would be at that size. What was killer, however, is that xsv gave me a lot of tools that helped exactly what I needed to do - sqlite wouldn't have helped at all. Right tool for the right job and all. What I was more curious about was if the original comment was about a particular case where sqlite beat xsv, or if it was more handwavy. Also, the comment seemed to imply that repeated queries would be faster in sqlite than with xsv but didn't mention anything about indexes. My suspicion would be that without something that can take advantage of an index, xsv and sqlite would perform about the same doing repeated table / file scans.