That is perhaps the worst advice I've ever heard. I spent a summer some years ago writing what, in abstract, were hand-coded SELECT and INSERT statements for CS

That is perhaps the worst advice I've ever heard. I spent a summer some years ago writing what, in abstract, were hand-coded SELECT and INSERT statements for CSVs. It was a waste of time; the number of bugs was ridiculous and the data integrity was attained by brute force. Today I'd use sqlite and/or postgres.