[yourapostasy]

I used to think this, and am still sympathetic to the motivation behind this. But I've since changed my mind when I saw the challenges faced in Big Data environments. Structured data is nice at first when you get into it. But the need for data prep stubbornly will not go away. If only because how your stakeholders want the data structured only sometimes aligns with the pre-defined structure. And when you get those numerous requests for a different structure, you're right back to data munging, and wrangling lines of text.

In my limited experience, you're either taking the cognitive hit to learn how to grapple with line-oriented text wrangling, or taking the cognitive hit to learn how to grapple with line-oriented text wrangling AND on top of that a query language to fish out what you want from the structure first before passing it to the text wrangling. I'd sure like a general solution though, if you have a way out of this thicket.