question on text file reading.

The company I am working with is using an old database, which doesn't even support memo field beyond 256 characters, so it is probably too difficult, and not worth trying to interface the database with php. I was wondering how easy it would be to have php access the database via SQL. The data we are looking for is accessible via SQL. I know that with my database, that php -could- execute a shell command which would get the data needed via SQL. The data returned would simply spool to the screen, or to a file. How difficult would it be for php to read and sort the data that was available that way? The data is just fields separated by pipes. I imagine that it might be possible for php to read the delimited text file, but what about php reading back the text file directly from the command that is executed? This would be similar to php having to execute the command; $ cat datafile.txt and read the results. In my case, the command would be more something like; $ SQL sqlrequestfile where I have my sql commands in "sqlrequestfile".