Yeah the json is quite horrible too. A year and a half ago I set up a process to shred the new files daily with powershell and dump them into SQL. Gave up in the end though, was getting to expensive as I built it on azureYe ...and 100Gb of data at least to get from edsm. I have 280Gb hdds. In shorter forms it gives json. So lua is good to traverse over json.
For global search he needs, it should be full SQL clone though.
For finding tritium around Borann my C++ code is sufficient