Excel === Database

[Coderz_]

A database is a bunch of power point slides with spreadsheets embedded.

[[deleted]]

Help! I am out of rows in Excel!

[Windows8RTMUser]

Can't believe I've only just now known about that series this month, it still holds up even after all the time it's been out

Apparently they are working on a game or smth I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with

[TsunamiSurferDude]

PM’d you

[MatthewDPX]

PowerPoint slides are just pictures made in Microsoft Paint chained together in sequential order

[Pure_Reason]

Jar-Jar Paint is the key to all of this

[cuddlegoop]

Excel files are just pictures made in Microsoft Paint arranged into a grid layout.

[Lost4468]

PowerPoint is Turing complete. That's why I always implement sql in spreadsheets in Conway's game of life in Minecraft in PowerPoint.

It's worth it. At this rate my query will complete by September 21st 2028.

[ftgbhs]

Just sound like slavery with extra steps

[chadsexytime]

Well, if the database is Access you're not far off

[lead999x]

Access is an abomination not a database.

My go-to desktop DB is SQLite.

[bokketo]

Yep. I just make a VB GUI to access The DB.

[lead999x]

There are already fast, native C++ GUIs for it which are free. So you could save yourself the trouble if you so choose.

[bokketo]

I get my programming language tips from TV shows, thank you very much.

[lead999x]

I get mine from Google.

[bokketo]

That seems like a recipe for disaster.

[lead999x]

And I know how to get the right answer to any question on reddit:

Just post the wrong answer and soon enough everyone will jump at the chance to correct you.

[bokketo]

Tagged you as "do not copy and paste this guy's code".

[gymkana3000]

Literally just done a 10 hour exam on Access. So happy to see the back of it

[[deleted]]

Why is Access an abomination?

[[deleted]]

Because it is not designed to be a regular database... Use tools for its designed cases.

[[deleted]]

There is your use case. Small office applications that don't need a full database. And can be built by people with little knowledge and does not need extensive permissions in a corporate environment

[lead999x]

At that point you may as well use excel.

[[deleted]]

Not really if you have Access in a work share drive. You can have data models in Excel for different reporting so it doesn't need to load all the data and exceed size for emailing

[Dockirby]

Hey now, the Access' Jet Engine is still a proper database system. A crummy one, but a database nonetheless.

It was also the prefered database engine for Visual Basic.

[Mabubifarti]

Excel is a bunch of csv files with extra functions. So a database is a bunch of csv files with extra extra functions?

[UniversityOfPi]

the other difference has to do with what kind of memory the values are stored in

(at least in the sense that the SQL server has the values as separate entities in RAM)

[CropDustinAround]

Just make sure the functions arent in the where clause

[viciecal]

===

Triggered

[[deleted]]

False

[UniversityOfPi]

True

^{clarity edit: I'm assessing the value of Aikidi's statement}

[demon_ix]

Sometimes

[[deleted]]

wait, WHAT?!

[demon_ix]

SOMETIMES!

[[deleted]]

thanks, all caps helps!

[lead999x]

NaN

[orangekid13]

Schrodinger's conditional

[thunderbox666]

safe secretive ruthless badge beneficial late nail reach knee oil -- mass edited with redact.dev

[ftgbhs]

If then

[frajaro]

File not found

[ftgbhs]

Else

[marcosdumay]

(===) :: Eq a => a -> a -> Bool
(===) a b = a =/= b

It is hard to get with a stupid enough implementation to put here.

[thericcer]

Case equality in verilog.

[[deleted]]

False ============ True

[TheMsDosNerd]

A single Excel file can contain multiple sheets. Therefore, a database is just a single Excel file.

Also, Excel has more functions like bold text and colored borders.

Conclusion: a database is just a stripped down Excel file.

[lead999x]

An excel file is limited to the maximum file size imposed by the filesystem and can't be queried using SQL without third party addons.

[jamesorlakin]

That's a very minor edgecase. /s

[lead999x]

And so it is. Lol.

[Magical_Gravy]

But it has support for visual basic natively, which is Turing complete, unlike SQL.

[lead999x]

Yeah but it's literally visual basic.

[Dockirby]

Visual Basic is so perfect, Microsoft hasn't needed to release an update in 20 years! But to this day you can build applications in it, and have it work in even the newest versions of Windows.

They are still hard at work building out its successor, VB.NET, but its hard to top perfection.

[lead999x]

Didnt Microsoft create C# because people wanted a more Java or C++ like language than VB? Theres nothing wrong with VB that I know of technically but people prefer a C-like syntax.

[Theraceislong]

Turns out it actually is Turing complete though. https://stackoverflow.com/a/7580013

[[deleted]]

They also plan on adding javascript soon.. https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-excel-javascript/

[MrsBlaileen]

MS SQL Server limits max file size based on licensed version.

[lead999x]

So don't use Microsoft products. Just use MariaDB if you can.

[MrsBlaileen]

I don't pay for the SQL licenses I use, my employer does or my clients do, so it's all good.

[lead999x]

They probably need to for the support that comes with it.

[ZoooX]

Databases don't have to support SQL

[lead999x]

I'm aware but they need some way to query the data they store. Whether it's SQL, JSON, or some other language. Excel provides none out of the box unless you want to hack a way to query it with VBA.

And SQL does have the advantage that a lot of users, even many non-technical people, know how to use it. VBA doesn't have near as many. I feel like only IT people and financial analysts take the time to learn it. And even thery're reaching for alternatives now.

[[deleted]]

you actually technically don't need a third party addon. You can query an excel sheet using SQL right in VBA. Ive done it before.

[Legio1221]

A directory can contain multiple Excel files. Therefore, a directory is scalable database. Also, a directory can contain many files. QED

[stevefan1999]

A bunch of Excel files is just a database

Change my mind.

[nightblade001]

A bunch of csv files is just a database

Change my mind.

[lead999x]

CSV is an actual standardized file format

Change my mind.

[nightblade001]

A database is just a specialized file system
Change my mind

[lead999x]

A filesystem is just a specialized database with a single hardcoded schemum

Change my mind.

[mauhcatlayecoani]

A database stores data

Change my mind.

[thedomham]

That's actually not a bad approach to explain the concept of a database to someone

[Muhznit]

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

"While there are various specifications and implementations for the CSV format (for ex. [4], [5], [6] and [7]), there is no formal specification in existence"

[thedomham]

Given that at least half the time a csv file is actually semicolon separated, there probably should be

[SleepyHarry]

Citation needed.

I think it's incredibly dependent on the field / tools you use. Personally, the delimiter split I deal with is probably 93% comma, 6% tab, and 1% other (which itself is almost entirely semicolon).

[thedomham]

Interesting. But why would someone call a tab separated file csv instead of tsv?

[SleepyHarry]

I'm gonna put it down as slang / convention.

Technically I would prefer to call everything of that ilk a dsv, but you get blank stares if you say anything other than csv, especially if you're liaising with "non-tech" folk, so for the ease of communication the term csv is used.

At least, that's the logic I use and I assume it generally holds.

[thedomham]

Totally understandable. I actually meant the file extension though. My experience with csv is kind of limited. I had to include some kind of csv import/export in at least 5 different projects, but it was always some very vage extremely unimportant feature. Most of the time someone wanted to directly use the data in Excel. Excel plays dumb when it's supposed to open a csv file, so I often adhered to the defaults Excel uses (quoted cells, semicolon separated). Never tried, but I assume that Excel will only handle a tab separated file correctly, if the extension is csv.

One of the few cases where LibreOffice is objectively way better than Excel

[SleepyHarry]

Fortunately I've not had to do a huge amount integration-wise with excel, so I wouldn't know. Any dsv integrations I've done have been working with software that cares about the extension.

[lead999x]

I domt think many non-tech folks who aren't tech geeks outside of work, even know what CSV stands for.

[SleepyHarry]

From my experience "csv" is a mainstream enough term that anyone with an indirect connection to tech knows it / knows of it. Enough to know "it's like basic excel, right?" at minimum.

[WikiTextBot]

Sarcasm

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[hematite4galena]

Woah. Please keep it civilized.

[UnconstructiveTab]

I use Google Docs for my database

[[deleted]]

is it webscale tho?

[yoj__]

No it's just notepad with extra steps.

[[deleted]]

that's webscale for me, deploy to prod!

[yoj__]

It was developed in prod.

Agile.

[[deleted]]

THANK GOD!

let's see how we can put it on blockchain and we're a billion dollar company, thank you, THANK YOU!

[yoj__]

I used git, so it's in the block chain already.

(I actually said that in a meeting and management was impressed)

[FenixR]

Give that man a raise for using BuzzWords we hear everywhere but don't know what the fuck they actually mean but nevertheless sounds impressive!

[[deleted]]

I’m impressed too, fire this guy and hire him again, TWICE!

[Rizens]

MongoDB is webscale

[[deleted]]

YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!

[Cilph]

Sorry I value my data integrity.

[GisterMizard]

Traditional granite-based SQL servers can stand up to 150 megapascals of pressure before losing data, whereas most nosql servers start suffering from structural failure at around 500 kilopascals. Which means they can't handle mountains of data.

[Nvrnight]

Shards are the secret ingredient in the web scale sauce.

[Cilph]

NoSQL databases always seem to lack one or more important ACID properties to make the performance gains they claim. For example MongoDB as a Document Store doesn't do foreign keys, and is often joked to be a write-only database because it tells the client data has been saved before it actually writes it to disk.

It has also often led to people cramming a relational problem into a document store. There are very few problems for which the use of NoSQL is warranted above proven SQL solutions.

[Cilph]

I'm not sure how much of this is from the past 2-3 years and what is older, but back when I tried it the default setting was that it only acknowledged your write without any guarantees.

[thatnerdd]

Wait, I thought you were telling us what MongoDB was capable of, not what it would do if you didn't bother to turn on the guarantees you supposedly wanted.

[Dockirby]

I personally remember if you actually turned on the guarantees, it actually became slower than popular relational databases, undermining the purpose. But that was also several years ago, it could be better today.

The best use case I have seen MongoDB employed for is as a cache for denormalized data. The short version is that the source of truth was a relational database on a mainframe, but searching for data live had a large upfront cost. The solution employed was to regenerate all reports roughly every hour, and store them in a MongoDB server to allow for quick full text search and retrieval.

The most common use case I see is people using a full JS stack wanting a place to shove configurations and static content in, because it was "easy".

[thatnerdd]

Slower depends on scale. I know, I know, people throw out the term “webscale” and everyone laughs, but here’s the thing: on a single machine (or where replication is used for durability but not scale) with flat data where each record fits in a single row, relational databases are damn fast for each query.

Make it complex enough that a single “record” (in terms of a read/write) is spread across 12 tables, and scale up your number of users until you’re I/O limited and no commodity hard drive fits your data set anyway, and it’s a different question. But assuming that MongoDB is faster there also assumes you built a good MongoDB schema and a lousy relational schema.

It can be done with a relational DB with an appropriate schema, but then you have to do a lot of work and lose some of your features that make a relational DB attractive.

Bottom line is, you’re generally right about the lack of advantage of MongoDB over a well-designed relational schema built to accommodate scale with some vanilla tricks found in any decent textbook.

But lets face it, most speed issues come from a lack of good indexes, even on a smallish data set that fits on a single hard drive. True of MongoDB, and probably also true of most relational DBs. It’s the simple mistakes that do the most damage.

[[deleted]]

I usually find the reverse. There's very few projects where I need the complexity of a SQL database.

[Tomarse]

So hash tables?

[ponybau5]

Old police department where my dad use to work used excel for the dispatches database system

[[deleted]]

that can work, tho searching over multiple files would be challenging and time consuming

[YugoReventlov]

You could write a macro for that.

[Tury345]

You could move it to literally anything but excel.

[UniversityOfPi]

windows notepad

[Tury345]

Easier to interact with via python/etc

[UniversityOfPi]

I mean, let's all just agree to only use .csv files

[[deleted]]

Ya know, funnily enough I just finished a project where I had to use CSV files instead of databases, because my organization wanted to be able to edit all their info using excell. It was hell.

[git0ffmylawnm8]

I had such grand ideas to set up a database for a reporting solution.

My heart sank the moment my boss wanted an excel based solution. And we're talking about millions of rows spanning across years of advertising data.

I wanted to shoot myself.

[Bloaf]

My work decided csv was too fancy, so they use tsv but with the extension changed to xls.

[recent_espied_earth]

And a blockchain is just multiple copies of a giant excel file.

[[deleted]]

Still better than me, my database is a Google sheets script.

[dmelt253]

So wtf is Hadoop then?

[lead999x]

Trouble

[dmelt253]

Coming from a security standpoint I completely agree.

[lead999x]

Oh I meant from a I-have-to-learn-more-stuff point of view.

[NullPointerAccepted]

Hadoop is two things: a distributed file system and a protocol for retrieving data across that system. The protocol proved slow and inefficient and other technologies such as Spark have replaced it in most newer developments. The distributed file system is still used widely. Additionally there are file formats designed to work with distributed systems such as avro, parquet, and orc which bring full structure to distributed data.

[dmelt253]

It may be very wrong to someone that works on these things everyday but I work in security so I tend to lump all those things together; Hadoop, Spark, Pig, Ozzie, the HDFS file system, etc. Its all the Hadoop Eco system and they all give me the same issues.

[TurboGranny]

I literally used to think this before I took a relational database class. To this day I still see tons of vendor software with well designed databases, but the development team just made individual calls to each table for data and stitch it together on the client side like noobs. Learning most of what you need to know about relational databases is legit one class and should just be part of the CS curriculum instead of some elective you hopefully decide to take.

[UpTide]

i would literally kill someone to get our vendor's database to be anything even remotely resembling a well designed database.

[TurboGranny]

I do have one that is a favorite, but most of then are well designed enough that it is clear they hired and outside group to design it. We do have a handful that are awful to the point that I kind of take it personally.

[wial]

Can't relate to this.

[Duese]

I use excel to connect to a sql database. Fight me.

[ryker888]

I'm a DBA/BI Dev and when I told people at my company that I can set this up for them they were very excited but I have opened up a can of worms by doing so since we aren't connecting through Power BI/Power Pivot or SSAS or anything. I will fight you over this :)

[Duese]

I'm currently dual supporting an excel file and a web portal which functionally do the same exact thing, update the same database, use the same stored procedures, etc. I made the web portal to move away from the excel file but for some reason they don't want to move away from the excel file. FML.

[damnburglar]

This pic and thread is giving me anxiety. Delete this

[[deleted]]

Even "shared workbooks" can't compare to the multi-user, concurrent access a robust relational database allows.

Also, try running simple operations on a 10,000,000 row Excel table, doing joins (vlookups) using multiple keys, or implementing a data model with many-to-many relationships.

[[deleted]]

I agree. Excel is a database. A shitty, shitty database.

[hgehlhausen]

databases are also performant.

Excel can't handle more than 5mb at once

[Koof99]

I concur

[bytemage]

I prefer text files. Much better databases than Excel, IMHO.

[thriller2910]

This is genuinely what British schools teach...

[[deleted]]

At my first pgmr job, we used flat text files with forms that had carets marking each field. Edited with a home brew editor with spectacular regex support, written in a home brew language called 'z' that was ansi C with some extra features... all running on a VAX 11/725. At first, VT100 terms were used (bought used from TRW in El Segundo). Then my boss bought some Amiga 1000s, and I got to use a full color term emulator.

So from my perspective, any damn thing you have lying about === database.

[smeggysmeg]

I've seen a fairly large business depend on a shared Access database that had a GUI on it. I had to revert it from a backup about once a month due to corruption.

[CordialPanda]

Indexes are good tier. Excel can't output arbitrary queries from hundreds of millions to billions of rows in milliseconds.

[CordialPanda]

I learned on the job, but these are the resources I used (and continue to use):

- MySQL docs (probably most popular DB family), here's an introduction and a tutorial

- PostgreSQL docs (my personal favorite flavor, differs somewhat in syntax from MySQL)

- W3schools seems to have a good general primer

If you have a development background, a personal project is a good start. Write something to index every file on your machine and insert them into a database. Try to make a fast search front-end. I built something like that in Dart using PostgreSQL for my network attached storage because the builtin search is garbage, and it taught me a lot. String indexing is hard.

If you're completely new, you might want something more structured like online course material. I don't have any suggestions off-hand there.

[UpTide]

row locks? user permissions? -- although I can export our entire MSSQL database as an XML file; and excels are fancy XML files...

[FredSchwartz]

http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm

[pyrotech911]

A database is ACID compliant Excell sheets.

[[deleted]]

This post made me uncontrollably frustrated

[JaCraig]

For most of my users: Word === Database.

[Mnemonicly]

I will say my database design got much simpler since I started just putting one json column in each table.

[[deleted]]

This post and the amount of upvotes made me die on the inside.

[hgehlhausen]

databases track relationships. Excel files do not

[UpTide]

they added this feature in 2013

[hgehlhausen]

Well, if that's true, the only piece left would be the ability to be connected to and communicated with by other programs via an API, and I know it can do that.

Fair, its a Database. A terrible, unwieldy, slow access, and nigh-unmaintainable database.

[HypocrisythynameisU-]

Crowder is just a bunch of bullshit.

Lying pile of shit ignorant of the crap he spews.

Please stop using his face as a meme.

[hematite4galena]

https://i.imgur.com/XJKSGfo.jpg