Thanks DM Heatstroke, I really should have thought of that trick on my own. My opinion was really more a question of not knowing the sql writer's program's capabilities and limitations; if it could be done automatically, it should be i.e. If it can't, well that's it & that's that.
Now that I have this mostly installed, I would add the criticism that the straight prc_cached2da is a bit (well, a lot) excessive in size. 830,000 rows and counting. I can't report on the in-game SQL reads and the subsequent runtime deltas yet, but gut instinct tells me they might be a bit large and laggy--even on a pretty decent machine. I'll happily be proven wrong on this, btw.
Are there any plans to break down some of the individual 2da's into seperate tables, in a future edition? Some of these could be accessed quite a bit during game play, unless I am misunderstanding the purpose of these cached 2da's. Are they used soley for the CCC, or do the scripts make calls to them for other data during gameplay as well instead of Get2DAString and its kin? If the former, I would then further assert that their full potential is not being yet exploited.
Ooo, here's a question. I notice spells.2da in its own seperate file prc_cached_spells.2da, and also broken down into 200k or so lines of prc_cached.2da. Can the prc_cached.2da entries be deleted, or are both being used by the PRC system at this point?
PS: EDIT -- Before my criticisms are miscontrued, let me say that I've enjoyed the work of the PRC crew for many years; you people do a fine job here. I'm merely offering suggestions to try and help make a great thing even better if possible, as I'm unfortunately way too swamped to offer any real-time assistance.