Most relational databases offer ACID, for one thing. And also a query language, which is easy to write and modify queries for, presenting a great benefit over

Most relational databases offer ACID, for one thing. And also a query language, which is easy to write and modify queries for, presenting a great benefit over writing large amounts of boilerplate code for looping over records and accessing the right indices every time (keep abstracting that and you'll end up with your own relational database system). I often import data into SQLite just to work with it, without necessarily even an application in between. Depending on the nature of the data it's either that or Matlab.