[bartonfink]

Sure, but I doubt you'd seriously try to handle that with pipes and Unix anyway. 10g warrants someone who knows what they're doing and knows, like you, when the overhead of writing in C pays for itself in faster processing.

[ansgri]

Unless you're in scientific community, where it's common to have to convert GBs of data from one weird format to another, or possibly analyzing them, nevertheless knowing only e.g. R and Matlab.