Seems to me, messing with immense flat files is going to be faster iff you have a Computer Scientist of an equal caliber to the ones who wrote <insert professio

Seems to me, messing with immense flat files is going to be faster iff you have a Computer Scientist of an equal caliber to the ones who wrote <insert professional SQL DB here> to optimize your indexing and storage formats and disk access patterns and whatnot. That is, at the very least, going to be expensive. It may just be simpler to just throw Oracle/Hadoop and hardware at the problem.