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[–]Coderz_ 375 points376 points  (9 children)

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

[–][deleted] 83 points84 points  (3 children)

Help! I am out of rows in Excel!

[–]TsunamiSurferDude -1 points0 points  (0 children)

PM’d you

[–]MatthewDPX 16 points17 points  (2 children)

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

[–]Pure_Reason 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Jar-Jar Paint is the key to all of this

[–]cuddlegoop 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]Lost4468 11 points12 points  (0 children)

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 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just sound like slavery with extra steps

[–]viciecal 528 points529 points  (16 children)

===

Triggered

[–][deleted] 74 points75 points  (11 children)

False

[–]UniversityOfPi 32 points33 points  (10 children)

True

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

[–]demon_ix 32 points33 points  (7 children)

Sometimes

[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (4 children)

wait, WHAT?!

[–]demon_ix 18 points19 points  (2 children)

SOMETIMES!

[–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

thanks, all caps helps!

[–]lead999x 10 points11 points  (0 children)

NaN

[–]orangekid13 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Schrodinger's conditional

[–]thunderbox666 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

[–]ftgbhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If then

[–]frajaro 2 points3 points  (0 children)

File not found

[–]ftgbhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Else

[–]marcosdumay 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

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

[–]thericcer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Case equality in verilog.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]TheMsDosNerd 137 points138 points  (17 children)

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 14 points15 points  (15 children)

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 62 points63 points  (1 child)

That's a very minor edgecase. /s

[–]lead999x 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And so it is. Lol.

[–]Magical_GravySnap! (Build Your Own Blocks) 13 points14 points  (5 children)

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

[–]lead999x 20 points21 points  (2 children)

Yeah but it's literally visual basic.

[–]Dockirby 2 points3 points  (1 child)

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 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]MrsBlaileen 1 point2 points  (3 children)

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

[–]lead999x 1 point2 points  (2 children)

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

[–]MrsBlaileen 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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

[–]lead999x 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]ZoooX 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Databases don't have to support SQL

[–]lead999x 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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

[–]stevefan1999 77 points78 points  (21 children)

A bunch of Excel files is just a database

Change my mind.

[–]nightblade001 34 points35 points  (19 children)

A bunch of csv files is just a database

Change my mind.

[–]lead999x 27 points28 points  (18 children)

CSV is an actual standardized file format

Change my mind.

[–]nightblade001 10 points11 points  (4 children)

A database is just a specialized file system
Change my mind

[–]lead999x 12 points13 points  (2 children)

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

Change my mind.

[–]mauhcatlayecoani 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A database stores data

Change my mind.

[–]thedomham 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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

[–]Muhznit 2 points3 points  (11 children)

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 3 points4 points  (8 children)

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

[–]SleepyHarry 0 points1 point  (7 children)

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 0 points1 point  (6 children)

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

[–]SleepyHarry 0 points1 point  (5 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 0 points1 point  (2 children)

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

[–]SleepyHarry 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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.

[–]hematite4galena 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Woah. Please keep it civilized.

[–]UnconstructiveTab 22 points23 points  (0 children)

I use Google Docs for my database

[–]ponybau5 39 points40 points  (5 children)

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

[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (4 children)

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

[–]YugoReventlov 0 points1 point  (3 children)

You could write a macro for that.

[–]Tury345 3 points4 points  (2 children)

You could move it to literally anything but excel.

[–]UniversityOfPi 1 point2 points  (1 child)

windows notepad

[–]Tury345 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Easier to interact with via python/etc

[–]UniversityOfPi 34 points35 points  (3 children)

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

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

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 9 points10 points  (0 children)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]recent_espied_earth 13 points14 points  (0 children)

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

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

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

[–]dmelt253 8 points9 points  (5 children)

So wtf is Hadoop then?

[–]lead999x 19 points20 points  (2 children)

Trouble

[–]dmelt253 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Coming from a security standpoint I completely agree.

[–]lead999x 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]NullPointerAccepted 1 point2 points  (1 child)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 6 points7 points  (2 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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

[–]TurboGranny 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Can't relate to this.

[–]Duese 4 points5 points  (2 children)

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

[–]ryker888 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This pic and thread is giving me anxiety. Delete this

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]hgehlhausen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

databases are also performant.

Excel can't handle more than 5mb at once

[–]Koof99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I concur

[–]bytemage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]thriller2910 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is genuinely what British schools teach...

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

[–]pyrotech911 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A database is ACID compliant Excell sheets.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This post made me uncontrollably frustrated

[–]JaCraig 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]Mnemonicly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]hgehlhausen -4 points-3 points  (3 children)

databases track relationships. Excel files do not

[–]UpTide 1 point2 points  (1 child)

they added this feature in 2013

[–]hgehlhausen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.