I'm going to write that story fresh sometime over the next few days.

But the TL;DR version is this: given a 1,000 record file of

foo,1

foo,2

...

foo,999

A Perl script using built in commands can read and print all of it before a MySQL database can even connect and be ready to find something in it. That was on 2005 hardware..

I'll test that on modern hardware soon.

No, I do not use 3rd party libraries unless I absolutely have to. The road to hell is paved with 3rd party libraries and dependencies.