I would have to agree with "none of the above" unless by easier you mean "more intuitive", in which case well that's up to the end user. But possibly. On a related note, why not try playing with Sprite.pm which is a subset of SQL in pure Perl for handling user-defined flat-file formats. It's not blazing, so you can nix that point. But it's not terribly slow either, especially for reasonably small to mid size applications.