> If you're using a large genomic dataset, you shouldn't be sorting your results in text format anyway... it would take way too much time and temporary disk space. What you'd probably want is a row filter to extract out the rows of interest.

For repeated queries, this isn't efficient. This is why we have indexed, sorted BAM files compressed with BGZF (and tabix, which uses the same ideas). Many queries in genomics are with respect to position, and this is O(1) with a sorted, indexed file and O(n) with streaming. Streaming also involves reading and uncompressing the entire file from the disk — accessing entries with from an indexed, sorted file involves a seek() to the correct offset and decompressing that particular block – this is far more efficient. I definitely agree that streaming is great, but sorting data is an essential trick in working with large genomics data sets.