Monotony -1
Recently I had to liberate some data from an old MS Access DB, so I discovered a gem of a Ruby gem called "sequel" that generalizes database access (for many different databases) - ORM style. Most excellent, so I figured I wanted to run it on my raspberry pi to access various sqlite databases I have lying around. Assuming you already have ruby (1.9) installed, you can simply do (in any Debian flavored Linux, for that matter):

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev

and

sudo gem install sequel sqlite3

So now one can fire up irb and do things like:

require 'sequel'
db = Sequel.sqlite('some_db.db')

Etc.

(This will, of course, not let you access MS Access DBs on your pi, as they rely on the "win32ole" gem - only available on windows, and the "Microsoft Access Database Engine" - also only available on windows. More info on how to connect to those kinds of database can be found here - under 'ado'.)