I agree with you. In fact, I would say, get the db to do as much of set-based text processing as you can. It not the beefiness of the db servers that I think of -- it is the decades of heavy-duty, focused research on working with sets. Databases are just super at performing those tasks. Just check the query plan for any query -- it is pretty amazing.

Otoh, dbs are a royal pain in the derierre working with arrays and hashes kinda datasets. Once you get your data, nicely stuffed in an array, Perl can whip through it at close to machine speed (well, pretty much) searching for arbit. patterns and repurposing it as desired.

Maybe it is time for your code-reviewer to get a code review. ;-)