Unicage is a database development environment using Linux, text files and shell scripting to build information systems capable of handling enormous datasets cheaply, quickly and flexibly. Unicage combines a high-performance database back-end with a simple Linux shell-based programming front-end. The database engine has been optimized for "Big Data" sized datasets and has been benchmarked on databases as large as 50 billion records and still returned text search results in 0.227 seconds (see "benchmarks"). Despite its Big Data performance, Unicage does not require resource-heavy middleware, Java applications or SQL programming in order to create functional software. All coding is done in simple but powerful Linux shell scripting language using Unicage's custom shell. This massively increases performance while significantly reducing training requirements for developers and overall time-to-market. Scripts can be generated on-the-fly for ad-hoc analysis needs in a matter of minutes.