[AstroPy] SQL-like queries against astropy.table objects

[Brian Kloppenborg]

Greetings,

I have unfortunately fallen quite far behind on astropy development and 
my knowledge of the finer features of many of Python's libraries is 
limited because I do most of my work in C/C++.

I have a use case in which I have a small (< 100k row) amount of static 
data which I need to both visualize and be able to easily manipulate 
(grouping, inclusion/exclusion based upon some criteria, application of 
some simple mathematics without altering the original data). I've used 
SQL extensively in the past and the queries which I would run are a 
perfect use case; however, visualizing the data with matplotlib (or 
similar) might be more efficiently accomplished from an astropy.table 
object. Is it possible to run an SQL-like query against an astropy.table 
object? If not with SQL-like syntax, how else could this be done?

For example, say I have a table with the following columns (not the use 
case, but an easy demo):
JD, mag, mag_error

I could find all data points with an SNR > 100 within a date range by:
     SELECT * from table WHERE (JD > value AND JD < value AND 
mag/mag_err > 100);
quite quickly. Conversely, implementing something similar using numpy 
operations appears to be quite painful (e.g. 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7169240/moving-large-sql-query-to-numpy) 
unless this is already built-in to astropy.table objects.

Kind regards,
Brian Kloppenborg