good old SQL

It's been a little while since I've done this, but somewhere along the way while I was building a dictionary of dictionaries, that what I was doing was creating a little database and that there was this language extracting data from such things. Plus, the data was already in an MS Access database, which I could query using odbc.

I think I can get about 90% of what I want with a well-crafted query. I could do the rest in python, but I think I could simplify things with a user-defined aggregate function. I think I could do that with Access but I don't know how, so I'll probably move the data to sqlite and then use that to define my functions. Knowing that sqlite trick is also probably a more reusable skill (for me at least).

The database came with lots of nearly impenetrable VB code that creates temporary tables and aggregates in VB instead of in SQL (using GROUP BY). To make sure I understand what they're doing (and the data) before I start generating my own reports, I'd like to be able to reproduce their results. It'd be a neat trick to turn thousands of lines of VB into a tenth that in SQL and python. Ulimately, it would be more transparent and maintainable as well.