One of the comments to last week’s scribble on joins referred to the POSIX join command. What does this mean? There is a commandline tool called ‘join’ available on most Unix-ish boxes, including Linux and OS X. From my own Mac (“man 1 join”):
NAME
join — relational database operatorSYNOPSIS
join [-a file_number | -v file_number] [-e string] [-o list] [-t char]
[-1 field] [-2 field] file1 file2
The commenter also mentions this article which explores the command some more with examples.
It’s not MySQL, but it looks very useful. Not all data should be in a db, sometimes a textfile is perfectly sensible, and sometimes you just need an operator like this. And it already exists. Coolness.