Can be used to setup tables that correlate to files on your file system. e.g.:
CSV -- you can specify different separators and index fields, too!
INI-style
XML files
Some of its real strength comes with being able to do PIVOT table operations with data files on your system.
Caveat: you need networking enabled in MySQL in order to create a PIVOT table
You can also do an "unpivot" table type
Can be used to merge tables with different field counts. E.g.:
You have a table with "who, what, amount" and another table with "who, what, week, amount". You can merge these into a new table with "who,what,amount"
When merging tables, there's a special field "SPECIAL='TABID'" which makes the CONNECT engine auto-populate the source table name into the new table
This can be valuable if you partition data across multiple tables (e.g. table_week1, table_week2, etc.)