Postgres would probably be even easier, since it already has the framework to do this (foreign data wrappers) and a nice API to write said wrappers in python[1]

Postgres would probably be even easier, since it already has the framework to do this (foreign data wrappers) and a nice API to write said wrappers in python[1] - 200 lines to use your SQL client as an email reader[2], I imagine that wrapping /proc would be considerably less :) [1] http://multicorn.org/foreign-data-wrappers/ http://multicorn.org/foreign-data-wrappers/ [2] https://github.com/Kozea/Multicorn/blob/master/python/multicorn/imapfdw.py#L66 https://github.com/Kozea/Multicorn/blob/master/python/multic...