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Many of the operations you listed can be accomplished using pure Python and its standard library. As far as I know, Sage does not provide much more in this area than Python itself.

Custom data structures may be needed for the actual data manipulations. The data structure can be as "dumb" as a two-dimensional nested list (representing records and fields). Or it could be well-packaged using an object-oriented approach. Which one to choose depends on your specific usage case.

Regarding the mundane parsing of CSV (I am assuming "Comma Separated Values") files, there is a Python module called csv. This is more convenient to use, but if for some reason it is not flexible enough, there is also the regular expression module re.

File compression/decompression is provided by the gzip, bz2, zipfile, and tarfile Python modules, for the respective formats.

datetime, time, and calendar provide date/time-related functions.

Although you stated that you wanted to avoid SQL, it might be worth mentioning that Python's standard library also features SQLite in the sqlite3 module.