Question about sms

Hey all, i am currently doing research in linguistics and am interested in using huge sets of text message data to support my research. I am thinking of writing a program to extract text messages from a phone into a text file. Assuming permissions is allowed is this a simple feat? I do not want to use any third party apps of any sort.
Based on googling the text messages are stored in
/data/data/com.android.providers/telephony/databases/mmssms.db
Can anyone give me some direction on this? thanks