Perl

MySQL has a command line utility mysqlimport which imports CSV files into an MySQL database. In fact, mysqimport is a command line wrapper for LOAD DATA INFILE. Whilst constructing a price comparison website, I came across the problem of uploading merchant product catalogues, which could be 1,000,000 records+, into my MySQL database. The catalogues were provided in CSV format. Great, I thought, I'll use mysqlimport. My joy however was short lived - my host does not allow the use of the LOAD command from the filesystem. No problem, I thought, I'll use PHP.

You may be faced with the prospect of performing a batch save of taxonomy terms on your Drupal 6 installation. Using the normal interface, despite being clean and efficient, it could be an onerous task of many mouse clicks and wandering concentration resulting in errors. I was faced with such a situation so decided to quickly develop my own utility to perform a bulk save on my behalf. I decided upon Perl as the language to code in because I did not want the development time associated with user interfaces - this utility is for command line aficionados.