A toolbox approach to flexible and efficient data mining This paper describes a flexible and efficient toolbox based on the scripting language Python, capable of handling common tasks in data mining. Using either a relational database or flat files the toolbox gives the user a uniform view of a data collection. Two core features of the toolbox are caching of database queries and parallelism within a collection of independent queries. Our toolbox provides a number of routines for basic data mining tasks on top of which the user can add more functions - mainly domain and data collection dependent - for complex and time consuming data mining tasks.