I have recently been working on a project for the IGF (Independant Games Fesival), and I have recently been accessing game data from an SQL database using Transact-SQL. However, I do not wish to use a massive program like SQL when demoing the game. I need to have a demo that works on a single computer, and not have any long distance server-client technology implemented. I am attempting to create a file system in where I can read in a simple .xls file, or just a .txt file as spreadsheet data, and perform simple operations on it like access a line of data, delete a line of data, change a line of data etc. I am looking to see if there have been any tutorials on such a topic, or if there is some type of 3rd party program that works similar to the SQL query language, except for xls or text files. If not I may to write some complex file accessing code to parse data. Thanks for any ideas/help.

Well, first of all, there is always MSDE. Which is the desktop version of Microsoft SQL Server. You could also use an access DB, which will let you use a SQL style syntax to query the DB. Personally though, I would just use MSDE.

Sounds great, I am looking into into SQLite right now, MSDE has several installation failures if you don't have windows set up properly, so that is not a good option for distributing among people.

I would definitely say SQLite. If you wanted something more powerful, then go with Berkely DB.