relational tools?

[Jeff Sacksteder]

I'm looking for information regarding performing relational operations on
python native datatypes. 

As an example, consider the following: I read comma-delimited file into a
list then I read the result of an ODBC sql query into another list. I want
to then be able to use SQL or a close approximation of it to do select and
join queries using the two lists as relational tables.

If all the data I needed was in PostgreSQL, I could do this very simply with
server-side procedural languages, but I need to get to data from a variety
of sources. I could use Gadfly, but I want use the data as it is, not pour
it out into another database. I currently have a cumbersome procedural
program specific to my needs, but it seems like there must be a more general
solution. 

What is the best approach?