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First off, why DataGristle?

The answer is that the advent of easy access to vast volumes of data has changed the nature of data analysis. Fifteen years ago I might get one new source of data to analyze every month. Or every three months. Now, I get them every few days. But most of our tooling and methods are based on the prior circumstance. So, we have ETL tools, for example, that simply take far too long to configure for new feeds, and are of little help in doing the initial analysis of the data.

What I wanted instead was something that could automate or at least quickly and easily perform some of the common analysis drudgery.

And I wanted command-line utilities so that they could be easily used interactively at the command line, or embedded into scripts and then automated.

Oh, and I chose one night while laughing with my family about how my teenage sons didn't know the word 'gristle' - how in a house of vegetarians it's just not a common word. And not surprisingly, it's not very common in software titles either. Of course, it's got some baggage, but hey, it works as a metaphor.