Why would you want to do that? It looks like xml all over again. No advantages of user-readable format and no advantages of a real database. Talking to sqlite CLI tool is probably a little bit more useful.
XML? I keep databases in user readable/writable format that I also parse with awk. The whole point of awk is to parse human readable text. No XML nonsense. Just text with a non-rigid structure.
If you need a database, you really shouldn't allow the text to be parsed as anything else than originally intended. With "just text with a non-rigid structure" it's just too easy to make a silly mistake. So what is the advantage here, given we have bdb and sqlite on almost every machine nowadays?
Or the other way - if you need something human-readable, why use is as a database? Why not keep the data where the data belongs and generate the reports when needed from there?
