Sustained exponential advances in computing power, drops in associated costs, and Open Science initiatives allow us to process on a personal computer the metadata from most major international academic publishers. Alexandria3k is an open-source software library and tool that builds on this capability to allow the conduct of sophisticated bibliometric and scientometric studies as well as systematic literature reviews in a transparent, repeatable, reproducible, and efficient manner. In total the Alexandria3k system provides relational access to 1.9 TB of data comprising more than 4.2 billion records of published works, authors, institutions, patents, and journals. Diverse examples demonstrate the system's use through ad hoc queries and the population of domain-specific databases to look into questions such as the disruption brought by new scientific findings, hyper prolific authors, researcher collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic, articles written by thousands of authors, the evolution of scientific publishing, and the dependencies between scientific fields. The system's implementation is based on SQLite virtual tables and some interesting tricks regarding table indexing and population.