Ok, it'll be a while before I get into my office, but I'm focusing on how it's going to run with MariaDB right now. I've got it all installed, with test programs up and running.

I just need to incorporate it all into the BigFile program that process the stock trades files.

Also, it dawns on me that, with a SQL server, there probably should be some kind of search to see if the data is already there before doing it again. We certainly don't want to duplicate this stuff in a database. But, that's a possible next step.

The unzipping actually runs pretty fast now. The bottleneck now that I'm seeing is in the ASCII-to-binary conversion and database writing, which I'm doing all in one step, so I can't tease those apart. But I feel pretty confident that the ASCII-to-binary conversion is about as fast as it's going to get. Hopefully, later today, I'll report time differences between writing MDB files versus shoving it all into a MariaDB SQL server (with ASCII-to-binary part of both of those).