Tab-Separated to Comma-Separated with a Twist

A recent Cast Iron project involved taking tab-separated files and producing comma-separated files as a result. Seems easy enough? Of course... except three of the five use cases required merging multiple input files before producing the comma-separated output. Since merging files in memory is not a Cast Iron best practice, Rapid Integration used a MySQL database to stage the data. The database query activity allowed us to use SQL to aggregate, sort and dedupe the data so that Cast Iron could do what it does best.