I hate CSV files. They seem like a simple and easy way to store data when you first get started, but they quickly become unwieldy. If you have more data than fits in 80 characters per row, or if you need to quote some of the data elements, or if you need to feed your CSV file to other programs you start to lose whatever advantages you thought you were getting in the first place.

There are programs that let you do SQL like queries on a CSV file, but if you are going to go that route, why not go the whole way?

So I've decided to try an experiment. Instead of using CSV or flat text files to store data, I'm going to use sqlite3 for a while and see what happens. I'll keep a directory ~/data in which I'll keep the data files.

So next time I need to make a list of TAs? Into a database. I imagine that I'll write a few scripts to make common things easy, but I don't know what they are yet. Check back in a few weeks or so.