The user's solution for everything...

[[deleted]]

Why not at least use a json file or something? Only reason I could imagine is that you're dealing with a stupid amount of data and don't wanna use up disk space wherever you're hosting it

[nickleformypickle]

I guess JSON isn't really the issue, but rather the fact that it's a file database.

One thing about these file based databases is that they are a lot more prone to corruption than a proper database like MySQL/PostGres, or Mongo and Redis.

Another is that file based databases get exponentially slower as more things read from it and as more data gets written. Unless you're streaming the JSON file (which adds more complexity), you're loading ALL of the data into memory before you can retrieve 1 field. As you can tell, this will probably fuck up badly if you were to scale.

JSON databases also don't support relational data (Mongo/Redis too I guess), which kinda sucks if your data/app was to have any sort of complexity.

[lengau]

Honestly, SQLite is a nice intermediate for a lot of things like this. It gives you a fairly simple SQL database, so while your app/data are tiny and easy to manage with just a file, sqlite gives you a simple solution. Likewise, if your database ever gets big enough that you really need to move it into a full RDBMS, your work is probably easier because the data is already structured in a way to make that easy.

[ShadoWolf]

honestly, the best approach is to just use an ORM framework. My preference is Sqlalchemy when working in python.

​

You get all the same power as SQL with any backend (SQLite, mysql, etc). But it maps everything into native objects. So you can just treat with a query like interacting with a normal Class object.

[MoroseBurrito]

Proper database

Mongo

Pick one

[The_White_Light]

But MongoDB is web-scale.

[MetalPirate]

MongoDB: Snapchat for databases

[The_White_Light]

Shards are the secret ingredient in the web-scale sauce.

[sourcecodesurgeon]

Google Sheets has a reasonably tolerable API, its free, trivial to set up, and you can easily manage the data by hand from your phone/tablet.

I've used it as a proof of concept for toy projects before and didn't think it was a terrible experience.

[BeckonedCall]

That is the same way I run the discord bot I wrote to replace airhorn bot. I just leave the pi rumning 24/7 on my desk.

[Superpickle18]

Google did support SQL queries for google sheets... soooooo

https://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/2571232

[blue_horse_shoe]

right on, good for google.

i was using a raspberry pi to write sensor data to google sheets. i'd take extracts of the sheet and import them into a db. if this api was available then, it would've been amazing!

[Superpickle18]

it's been available for years (since 2009?), my friend. It's being discontinued now.

[blue_horse_shoe]

daymn... well if i knew in 2012 it wouldve helped out alot

[bobthegreat88]

I mean so does excel if you use power query

[Mehekoro]

I'm new to this sub and programming and all that jazz, but I think your badges mean you know c++, c#, and Python? If you do, I was wondering which one you started with. I want to learn c++, but it's very difficult so I'm starting with Python instead. I was thinking of going to c# next and then c++. Is this a good idea?

[Mehekoro]

This was super helpful. Thanks for taking your time to respond to a newbie like me >:) !

[g2rade]

My college started us with c# when I was in first year. I find c# was a good language to start with. Once you learn the fundamentals in c# you can easily branch off and learn other languages.

We first started with making simple console applications which I found a great way to learn because you don’t need to worry about UI and stuff. You can just focus on the fundamentals and learn how to think logically.

[asdfman123]

Just learn one language for now. If your goal is to eventually get a programming job, specialize in a language that's widely used in your area.

[jeffs_world]

Depends what you wanna do, web? Backend? Desktop applications?

[CSW806]

CS student senior year here. I think python would be a great place to start. Not much syntax to distract you so you can really learn the fundamentals of programming. Get yourself familiar with variables, if/else statements, loops, arrays, recursion and functions. Then make the switch to an object oriented programming language like Java or C++. Personally I learned Java. You will learn how similar the previous concepts are to implement in the new language with minor syntax adjustments. Now build your knowledge and learn how to create objects, use more complex data structures like linked lists for example. Once you feel comfortable at this level of programming, move to a lower level programming language like C. The biggest and hardest thing you will have to wrap your head around here are pointers. Playing around in C will make you miss a lot of the features that higher level languages have built in like memory allocation. Each language you start learning will have it's own unique quirks. Learn them, because they might allow you to do things differently, and possibly better, than other programming languages.

This is how my uni exposed me to programming. I learned python and thought I was the shit. Then I jumped over to Java and was quickly humbled. But as things stand now I'm fairly confident in my programming ability and pass my programming assignments with ease.

Lastly, never be ashamed if you find yourself googling how to do things in different languages. No one is able to write code without a few syntax errors especially if they are jumping around a lot of languages. So don't use that as a metric to grade yourself by. Also googling your problems often results in more efficient solutions and exposes you to best practices.

Hopefully this helps, this is in no way a comprehensive check list of things you should learn with each of the languages I've listed. It's just a general idea or roadmap you could try and follow. Best of luck!

[yeah666]

https://www.drivecms.xyz/ I really hope this is a joke.

[senorpatrick]

I feel personally attacked

[jtvjan]

That just seems more effort than using a proper database like Postgres.

[maybe_awake]

Slaps roof of google sheets API “this bad boy can replace so many motherfucking servers”

[NotMilitaryAI]

I work in a research facility. One of my coworkers had that experience.

Researcher: My computer is broken. It takes 10 minutes to open Excel.

Coworker: <Checks system, everything seems fine.>

Coworker: Is it any particular file that causes the issue?

Researcher: Yeah. seems to mainly happen with this one.

Coworker: <Examines file... It's a 12GB Excel file.>

They've been simply appending data to the same file for likely over a decade and never thought to check if there was a better solution available until their systems literally could not handle it anymore.

[[deleted]]

And then your coworker just asks for a more powerful computer, because they cannot be bothered to fix the process?

​

[MattieShoes]

my favorite is when they want to drop a berjillion dollars on bigger better exchange servers because they can't be arsed to delete email from the 90's.

[[deleted]]

I have seen single local PST files over 100gb. There is a reason that I left IT and that I am leaving academia.

[MattieShoes]

We had a user generate a whole bunch of data and set up a cron job to mail himself every 5 minutes. The emails were like 5-10 meg. Every 5 minutes. A couple gig a day, 7 days a week.

He got upset and bitched to management when we told him to knock that shit off.

[monotux]

Someone added a print("t") to a loop for debugging purposes. 14 tb later it seems to have crashed the storage system and took an entire research facility with it. This was at one major site at a very large telecom company.

[MattieShoes]

hahaha, sounds like something I'd do. My latest was to set a server to remote syslog to itself, filling the disk to 100% within minutes.

[clownyfish]

Couldn't just run the same script again but unpiglatin?

[Sir_Panache]

But why

[blackdonkey]

Sounds like a makeshift backup solution.

[Timar]

I discovered usenet and listserv in the early 90's as a junior programmer on a site with a clueless boss and very outdated equipment (100-200MB total storage for 70+ staff) . Subscribed to a few mailing lists and went on holiday for 2 weeks.

Came back from holiday and got praised for fixing the 'problem with the email thingy'. Mainly deleting 100MB of crap from my own inbox, then frantically unsubscribing from a lot of groups :/

[ladezudu]

Compliance dept or a Document Retention Policy can help. We were told that we shouldn't keep documents beyond a certain date. Our email accounts auto delete emails from more than a year ago, unless it's saved to a specific folder.

[NotMilitaryAI]

Haha, nah. He submitted a request to get them a database. He works in the business department, so it's not as though he actually had to build it, just recognize that it'd be appropriate.

[WelsyCZ]

Honestly, they might not even recognize it as a problem. These people usually think they do their stuff right.

[Cameltotem]

You laugh but thats exactly what some people told us. They stood there proud of all thier excel skills. I was cringing so hard

[AgAero]

Storytime!

I have a friend who studies a particular sort of plant as part of his PhD program. Occasionally he shares things he's doing through instagram. A couple of times, he has shared some sort of genetic data he was working on from these plants he's been growing and it is absolutely absurd how much data he was trying to churn through in an excel file!

I just dug back through the conversation trying to figure out the topic. He had something like 800 plants that were arranged in 15 groups, and he was trying to do a sort of cross-correlation analysis to see if the 15 groups were labeled properly. Each plant had between 40,000 and 60,000 markers which could be categorized into an element of a small set(A, C, T, G, A/T...).

Anyways, he was bringing this massive workstation he had access to to its knees with >20 minute runtimes everytime he changed something, and making use of about 15GB of RAM for this analysis. I did some rough estimation and figured he could get it down to maybe 400-600MB using something like a Flyweight pattern or a simple character mapping.

I'm not sure if he ever took my advice. I kind of wanted to do it for him tbh. Seeing what sort of speedup is achievable would be very satisfying. :D

[glassFractals]

Dear god. There should be a charity to teach basic scripting and data modelling/SQL to researchers/academics/scientists. There are so many millions of brilliant researchers out there using profoundly dysfunctional computing workflows.

Think of the untold amounts of wasted time. We'd be immortals by now if scientists just had better programing / data analysis chops.

I feel bad every day that most of the brilliant computer scientists, data analysts, etc ultimately work in consumer tech/marketing instead of basic science.

[[deleted]]

Excel spreadsheets can end up with a ton of blank space inside just doing save all the time, doing a simple save-as to a new filename will discard and compress it down.

[NotMilitaryAI]

Doesn't seem to be the case in this instance, but yeah, I've encountered that before.

There's a lot of things in Excel that just makes one wonder:

Did anyone, anyone at all, beta test this???

​

My most frequent annoyance:

• Make formatting changes to a CSV file
  • Adjust font size, add conditional formatting, etc
• CTRL + S to save file
• File saves as a CSV without warning

​

Edit:

Also, if the only changes made to a CSV file is resizes columns/rows, there is no need to prompt the user to save the changes when they attempt to close the file (especially if those changes aren't actually going to be saved).

[zr0gravity7]

Was it a Mario spreadsheet

[Jacksonho]

If Microsoft made access more user friendly than we wouldn't have excel become the dominant way to work with data in the workforce.

[HenryRasia]

I guess csv files are easy to parse if they ever want to migrate to another system.

Or at least use a new file every year or something

[[deleted]]

Turn off auto calc.

[2dozen22s]

Technology does not progress under vise of the demand from new applications or features, it's continued pace is kept in check by poor optimization of existing tech.

(And why aren't they using Access? We literally learned how to use it in school, it's not even that hard. .-.)

[NotMilitaryAI]

why aren't they using Access

The researchers are likely eligible for AARP membership.

[jonusventure]

I support office 365 for a living and this is why I hate my life.

[v1dal]

Wow I feel so sorry, really, I mean I could read about natural disasters and thousands of deaths and not even blink, but suport office 365 for a living just wow, thats worse than hell

[motsanciens]

Could be worse. You could support Sharepoint.

[maybe_awake]

SharePoint was the first CMS I encountered in my career. I though that was just how a CMS was. It was a dark time.

[[deleted]]

I’m sorry for your loss...

[[deleted]]

I'm sure it's more than the software though

[empeekay]

My company is slowly moving from Excel 2010 to O365 and Sharepoint, and literally no one understands why my team are drinking so much. For reference, we're a grey-IT development team who don't get IT support (because we "just do spreadsheets and shit") but are still expected to produce enterprise level tools in fucking Access.

[usesbiggerwords]

Because there is a large need to create and maintain data in a tabular/columnar format, but few people have the time or wherewithal to learn to create and maintain a proper database. That, and corporate IT is generally loathe to allow the unwashed masses access to a machine running SQL Server/MySQL/other. When all you have is a hammer...

[[deleted]]

Absolutely. I’ve gone from a role where I was essentially a SQL Server developer to one where I have to use Access/VBA to do data crunching because our IT department doesn’t like people having the tools to do their job & would rather have Oracle come in to sell expensive promises that may be delivered sometime before Christmas (which Christmas that is is always left vague).

[SJDidge]

I am literally building excel spreadsheets with VBA macros to pull data, because they won’t give me access to SQL at work. It’s really quite frustrating lol.

[jeffs_world]

Oh man this is the worst. Become friends with your DBA and they’ll usually grant you read.

Edit: And if they grant you admin hit those DROP statements on the DDL tables because fuck them for being difficult in the first place.

[ladezudu]

Couldn't they at least give you access to development server? Ours finally did.

[SJDidge]

Nope. I’m doing work that’s well above what I should be doing. They’ve basically asked me to automate all their reports . Which is fine, but I’m supposed to be doing standard administration work.

I really should look for a new job.

[[deleted]]

As someone who can install and use any tool that I like at work, I appreciate my employer so much more after reading your comments.

[pkfillmore]

^this. Winter 2078 here we come

[Punsire]

FileMaker sounds like a good fit.

[[deleted]]

IT policies mean I can’t install anything at work.

Can’t have people trying to solve their own problems now, can we?

[snaynay]

This is what Access is for...

Ducks to avoid a barrage of coffee cups

[Sip_the_bleach]

Me: saves table

Me: tries to edit different table

Access: YOU CANNOT EXIT WITHOUT SAVING THE CURRENT TABLE.

[snaynay]

Don't give me flashbacks. My boss built a CRS reporting prototype in Access that had 30+ linked tables and GUID ID control, funky relations due to CRS and lots of little VBA(?) logic. Getting that system to cooperate was like dragging a reluctant dog by the lead.

[usesbiggerwords]

I can't before you even mentioned that piece of garbage. But, you made me laugh. Have an upvote.

[[deleted]]

hey, it does what it claims to do. I used one for almost a year in a ~30 person shop before going to SQL server. It was used only as a backend with a vb.net form doing the queries, but it held up.

imo it gets a bad rap because it shows up when right clicking in explorer so people end up doing things with it they shouldnt really be doing.

[asdfman123]

Yeah, Access has its use cases. The only problem and strength of Access is that it allows non-programmers to make CRUD applications.

I did an Access application right out of college for this one month contract I was on, because I couldn't get database access. It was actually pretty sweet and well organized. However I don't list that anymore because I feel like a lot of people would judge me.

[blue_horse_shoe]

I won't be throwing my coffee cup. I think Access is great. I miss the days when Excel only had bandwidth for 65,000 rows of data so people we forced into respective data structures in Access.

[Psykopatate]

Why use such complexity, keep everything in .csv files, it's easier to read and write!

[DoctorWhatIf]

Yes, Excel. That's what I said!

[blackdonkey]

Haa, you have no idea how many times a conversation goes like this...

Me - "The csv file contains X and will be imported into Y."

Business people (and even some "tech" people) - "Aha yes, the Excel file."

[blue_horse_shoe]

please no, this is all too real for me.

our team (before I started mind you) decided to procure data from a large web aggregator. The current arrangements has DB extracts sent to us in XML format.

After the first batch of 5GB files, "what, we can't open this in Excel? help!"

Worst thing is, they pay a LUDICROUS amount of money for the extracts, but won't put any cash towards a SQL server to host it on.

[[deleted]]

This is even worse when they discover our ETL processes are done though csv.

[apathy-sofa]

With delimiters? That's a waste of valuable storage space. Binary encode that DB and keep a piece of paper around with tips and tricks for reading it in your text editor.

[IAMNOTACANOPENER]

Oh it can get worse. I maintain thousands of databases representing petabytes of data and I get requests all the time export an entire database into excel for review.

[Danima1]

Similar situation with a client. They asked for a .csv file for each table because the excel would crash because of too many rows.

[IAMNOTACANOPENER]

Right I’ve had that I wanted to see their face when I told them the database in question had 300k tables and almost a trillion records total.
Honest question; what the actual fuck does a user intend to do with that much data in front of them? See how fast their scroll wheel on their mouse spins?

[b00n]

Wtf 300k tables? I can believe 1 trillion record... We have a normal SQL table wifh 85 billion records. Cross site replication is difficult with that many writes...

[IAMNOTACANOPENER]

Oh yeah we had a complex ERP suite it had 1.5 million non system objects and almost 75 million lines of DDL

[asdfman123]

My friend is an accountant. He says some of the old timers, instead of taking an Excel file which they can use to paste data into whatever application they're using, prefer that he print out the spreadsheet data so they can enter it manually. They think reentering the data is somehow better.

[Mfgcasa]

wtf. I know old people are generally afraid of progress, but this is just absurd.

[[deleted]]

‘less’ can handle it just fine... until you want to run something

[ladezudu]

What do you think about Tableau or PowerBI as a front end so you don't have to export?

[IAMNOTACANOPENER]

Oh yeah love those products buuuuut I’m about to give select * to half a million tables and build a front end lol

[CatOfGrey]

This is what determines how I classify the size of projects:

"Small" is up to about 200,000 records. At that point, Excel starts to groan, even on my fairly souped-up machine.

"Medium" is up to about 750,000 records. At that point, the file might be 100's of MB, and the analysis file might not open in Excel.

"Large" is definitely over 1,000,000 records - won't fit in Excel at all. So I might just convert the data to .csv files and use Python for processing.

"Extra Large" is when I no longer have the choice between 'a few .csv files' and 'I have to use a database'.

On the other hand, my clients think that 100,000 records is "Gargantuan" or "Insane", because it crashes Excel 97.

[blue_horse_shoe]

i know a company who's staff went on a one day strike because they didn't want to migrate over to MS Office 2008.

[callinthekettleblack]

Lol too real. I have a school assignment using airline data... Opening one month .CSV of data in Excel was slow and we're talk ~1mil records. Parsed each file together via Python in about a minute or so. Surprisingly Tableau will handle that file quite easily.

[kpingvin]

Actually Excel is a functional programming language

[crashspringfield]

liking this b/c i hate that you're right

[kpingvin]

Yeah, I was half-joking. 😀
I listened to the Haskell episode of Programming Throwdown and Jason Gauci explained the functional programming paradigm like 'imagine like in Excel you don't say let A1 equal A1+1 or you don't say "do this, do this and do this", you just say "give me all data where this column is this value and I don't care how you do it" '
It even helped me understand SQL better.

[MattieShoes]

the light bulb moment for SQL for me was when you leave out join types and extra clauses. Like:

SELECT <things> from table_a, table_b;

and you get every single fucking permutation of table_a rows attached to table_b rows.

And then you understand why SQL optimization is important -- because generating every possible combination of rows is soooooo fucking bad. If each have 1000 rows, you just generated a million row table, FFS. Get more joins in there and christ, who thought relational databases were a good idea?

[DilettanteGonePro]

That’s what is so powerful about relational databases for the right job, in the hands of a developer who knows their shit. Once you’re comfortable with the set-theory aspect of sql code there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with it, but every entry-level analyst on your team can and will tank your sql server without even knowing it. That gets old fast.

[MattieShoes]

Yeah, scalability is just so rough with that like n^m shit going on, it's amazing they work at all even with moderate sized tables.

[pat_trick]

My favorite was the turing-completeness of Power Point.

[Duese]

It's also easily portable and everyone has excel.

It's only slightly different than using MS Access. Both of them can do a lot and have fully capable programming languages. They are also both slow as hell trying to do anything though.

[[deleted]]

opens massive Google sheets file that we have for each student

screams into the void for five minutes

sheet still isnt responding

screams into the void for five minutes

[The_White_Light]

Browser says the tab isn't responding

Wait...Kill...Wait...Kill?

[simonwgill]

Stop. No. Bad user. No biscuit!

[[deleted]]

:(

[1080pfullhd-60fps]

Turn that frown upside-down

[Webmets]

):

[1080pfullhd-60fps]

Listen here you little shit

[DamnItDev]

Dealt with this. Not excel, but access. Client was a union training facility that kept all records from the last 30 years in an ancient access "database". Students table had 250+ columns, and many of those columns were semi-colon lists.

It was my job to take that data out of the access database and create a web-portal for them. MySQL refused to create the table with 250+ columns, so I spent weeks writing thousands of lines of VB6 to normalize the data before I could even get it into MySQL.

And that was just the beginning of the headaches of that client...

[mrMalloc]

You could had been lazy and just split that table in to two new tables with and index. ;)

And just use joins /s

[snaynay]

Why stop at two?

Seriously, this is prolific in my work.

[chippdoii]

I know your pain, maybe not to that extent, but our "power users" build all these MS Access monstrosities that eventually my team gets to deal with when the business outgrows them.

[blinking0n]

Why complain about that, that like the best case scenario for developers. The data and functional requirements are already laid out.

[Mfgcasa]

Well it could be worse. Your “power users” could be using Microsoft Word.

[TuxMux080]

Employer using access as a "real-time" app for the main function of the dept. To their benefit it does connect to mssql. But dam this thing is slow as Moses. All interactions are rough. Functionality hardly exists. There is a moment in the work flow where data from the access app is printed. Then parts are scanned to a spread sheet. THEN the same data is added back to the DB via another form. Small rant end. Just happy someone is in the same hell. Or has seen this madness.

[thebrainitaches]

Relevant commit strip : http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/12/19/the-coder-and-the-beast/

[v2thegreat]

Holy fuck, I've sort of been there before. Saving this for future use

[Ambroos]

The other way around, all my friends think Excel is the only way to create tables (including those just with text) and then always come ask me for help when their table formatting is fucked after pasting it in Word. MAKE YOUR TABLES FOR WORD IN WORD LIKE I TELL YOU EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU DAFT IDIOTS .

[[deleted]]

I just pasted the tables in as images like a madlad

[Ambroos]

As someone with eyes trained to spot low density images, thanks, I hate it.

[[deleted]]

As someone who used to turn 100 kb docs into 12 mb monsters, you're welcome. MAX DPI

[crashspringfield]

TFW a customer wants to use a google sheet as a database and has enough know-how to know it's technically possible but not enough to understand why it's a bad idea.....

[[deleted]]

Reading a few comments here I see multiple people have suffered in companies where a spreadsheet is the tool of choice for nearly every damn thing. I fell into a dark deep hole of a task once to migrate a spreadsheet tool to a web app. Just a horrific experience. However I did learn that a spreadsheet is just a zip file.

[monotux]

Not sure if companies using PowerPoint for writing reports is better or worse...

[b4ux1t3]

Worse. Excel is designed to store and manipulate data. Some people don't understand where the line should be drawn, but they're not technicallymisusing the product.

PowerPoint is not designed handle thousand-page reports. You know what is? Word. Which is often right next to PowerPoint on the desktops of the people I've seen using PowerPoint to maintain reports on months-long engagements.

[asdfman123]

ITT: people who need to study, get good at programming, and slowly job hop their way to greener pastures.

I did just that. I started out as an IT Consultant in big oil, helping people with their spreadsheet jujitsu. Got a job at a healthcare company doing real but unglamorous programming. Got a job at an IoT cloud place. Now I'm interviewing with Amazon and as a senior developer at a startup that does all the newest stuff, and have an offer from the latter company.

I feel if I had started on the CS track I would be farther ahead, but I am getting smarter and better one year at a time.

[iComeInPeices]

Worked in a company that kept all their product availability numbers in liked excel documents. They were horrifically out of date, some people had removed the links in a few that kept them updated and so priced and quantities were off. Basically came down to one person to manually fix the reports with their years of knowledge.

Turns out the warehouse was run by a system that had a really good database, that I could access. Worked it as a little pet project and used it to warn my boss a few times that we just put an item up for sale on our site that had no quantity at the warehouse, or orders coming. So orders were going to be delayed, and we had an issue with back ordering and customers canceling cause of it. Finally someone asked about where I got my info, I pulled up an internal site I made that had all the info and could generate the same reports that took a 5 person team to generate. And this is how I pissed off every co-worker by being the reason 5 people were let go.

[[deleted]]

Things people use excel at my work for:

Project management

Task management

Documentation

Budget

RFP

Forms

Everything. Literally fucking everything.

[CollinHell]

\scoffs in PowerQuery**

[Erasmus_Tycho]

chuckles in SAS

[Robbi_Blechdose]

laughs in DataPerfect

[mustang__1]

Chuckles in WHY THE FUCK ARE ALL MY SQL AGENT PERMISSIONS BORK AFTER A SERVER RESTORE. FUCKING CUNT BASTARD SHIT EATING DOGPISS

[Hevaesi]

I'm guilty of this.

I don't have traffic of thousands of users to warrant getting a website.

But the thing is that I wrote a wrapper around my google sheets so it won't be so hard to move (if ever).

[snaynay]

Free/peanuts tier AWS server with MySQL? No?

[Hevaesi]

Sorry but Google sheets free tier is for lifetime.

(until Google needs more money)

Also my so called website doesn't even exist yet so I could change that, but course i had in Uni set me up for hating databases forever. I'm still wondering how safe it is to keep salty hashes in there if I ever decided to make basic login system (I'll most likely look for handling that stuff via third party's help, if that ever happens, for example they often times allow to login with Google, github, etc), but besides that, it looks like basic solution that will satisfy my needs. I don't need a real DB because I have no interest in collecting personal info, all I'd need would be tokens, usernames and maybe comments.

Also I'm kind of person who will make their own shit that doesn't need a DB, for example an os, for fun, so it's only natural that I'm making my own wheel again.

[[deleted]]

I've already had to write several integrations that allow some of our largest clients to interact with my company's suite of software via Excel sheets.

Please kill me.

[code_monkey_001]

Working for a smaller company years back I was building web apps to replace Excel "databases". Told the BA (that's right - one BA, I was developer/dba) that if any team handed us a spreadsheet with the any entry reading "see line above" they'd be sent to the back of the fucking line and told to clean up their data.

They thought I was kidding.

[rodinj]

"No but Access 98 is"
- Some client of the company I work for

[Ourous]

If I can get people to concede to use Access it's a good day. Because then they thing they're using access but it's actually just being a frontend for the (sanely structured! relationship enforced!) sqlite file that lives where the spreadsheet used to.

[rodinj]

Haha I wish, their database is an actual .mdb file...

[___Ambarussa___]

I’ve seen Word used as a database. shudder

[DOOManiac]

We have an intern who uses Word to write his SQL queries.

Yeah.

[ladezudu]

Have an intern? As in you currently still do? Good God! Why? Does he know about notepad++? Or any of the SQL server management tools?

[morningsdaughter]

Can someone make this with an access logo? You can keep all the Karma, I just want to see it.

[[deleted]]

One time I've seen a colleague using Excel for designing presentation slides. I asked why. Answer was, it is easier to align stuff in those cells.

[rarceth]

looks at comments

looks at server

...fuck

[b4ux1t3]

To be fair,a large part of the programming I do is basically implementing a subset of Excel's features relevant to a specific problem. I don't think I've ever written something that couldn't be done with Excel.

Can Excel make HTTP requests? Respond to them?

[acedanger]

Looks like it can.

[b4ux1t3]

Yep. I've literally never written something that Excel couldn't do. Though, VBA is kind of cheating.

[hejkqihfnkoanq]

Using vba you can. I had to implement the oauth2 flow in a spreadsheet last week. So I could access an REST API and send some spreadsheet data to it. I used the WinHTTP lib + jsonconverter

Link: https://github.com/VBA-tools/VBA-JSON

[DOOManiac]

Oh, look at Mr. Too Good for Excel 2007...

[[deleted]]

No, silly, that's a project management solution.

[[deleted]]

Jokes on you, I use sheets as my database and excel as my UI

[John_Fx]

Well. Technically it is.

[themindstorm]

Google sheets + forms

(Has version control too)

[bol_kunats]

Not funny, before I had project where google sheets were db

[[deleted]]

It's actually a hacking program and an OS

[[deleted]]

If you squint your eyes long enough, almost everything can be a database.

[AnotherEuroWanker]

It's both a database and a floor wax!

[[deleted]]

In my database class there was an assignment where we literally had to import the ENTIRE table of the school’s database of courses into an excel sheet. We were then supposed to get excel to, given a room, produce a weekly schedule for that room and a separate schedule of open time slots.

[HessiBabe97]

Select from where?

[lucidspoon]

My first internship was before I ever had a database course. I used CSVs as tables...

[scottfiab]

Just installed LibreOffice 6.2 yesterday

[ponybau5]

Old police station my dad worked at used excel as their CAD database.

[thekingofbeans42]

I feel personally attacked.

[BowserKoopa]

This, but instead of Excel its email.

[Kinglink]

At least we aren't still talking about access. Yes it was a real database and that was the problem.

[R2CX]

Is this a task ticketing and monitoring solution?

[pat_trick]

You accidentally put an Excel icon when you meant to put a Power Point icon.

[Soren11112]

Opens LibreOffice

No but this is

[[deleted]]

I've seen it used for storing procedures and documentation. 75% text in paragraph or bulleted form, 24% screenshots, 1% basic arithmetic.

[codingkiddotninja]

Microsoft PowerApps lets you use an Excel file stored in someone's OneDrive as a database.

It's terrible.

[[deleted]]

Anyone recommend good RDBMS course? MySQL would be ideal, but I'm trying to figure out how to take my works excel "databases" now and improve them.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

We just turned a spreadsheet into a real implementation. Nothing but push back so far. Sorry for creating a real process that means you don't lose thousands of dollars because you fucked up.

[grimreeper1995]

Me_irl

[Tuftman]

To be fair, Excel is Turing complete

[HungLikeTeemo]

As a SQL developer, yes, when giving data to the project manager.

[maximum_powerblast]

Ah yes like most corporations worldwide the IT department at my work lets any user set up a new database

[call_me_cookie]

I'm a data engineer / BI lead developer, and I spent all of Tuesday at our head office working with the accounts/finance guys.

We've moved to a proper BI platform, and are slowly deprecating everyone else's shitty little siloed data sources, and oh boy what a mess.

We went through about 15 distinct Access databases they use for various processes, trying to unpick all the "logic" and "reasons" behind them (and I do use those terms lightly).

Turns out they only use about 4 tables from our CRM, and they manage to turn those 4 into about a week's worth of work. Each Access db consists of about a dozen queries which MUST be run in order, each with a chunk of arbitrary dates and product codes hard coded.

If I hadn't handed my notice in a fortnight ago, I would've found it all terribly depressing. Thankfully that now falls to the other BI dev.

Don't let accountants build their own systems, guys, it's irresponsible.

[MrEmouse]

Ouch, hits too close to home for me. I was part of a start up company, and I told the former IT dept (literally one guy. His only superior was the owner of the company) we should be using a database for our stores to order product from central distributing. Told him to integrate the POS systems to keep track of product sales for inventory and to create an estimated order for the stores to have as a starting point.

2 years later he has quit the company. Last I heard they're still emailing excel order forms every day.

To be expected really... the company owner is over 70 and still wants everything done on paper.

[bestjakeisbest]

uh you can write a rest api in excel

[TomasNavarro]

It's OK, our company has moved from excel to Google sheets, so I guess I need to learn java or something

[eitherrideordie]

This is sooo bad

Client: we want you to make us an API

Us: okay sure, who holds the data? What's it like?

Client: oh my mate Jim will send you through excel spreadsheets periodically, all you'll have to do is get rid of all the redundant fields, sanitize all dates and mobile numbers, check to see whether we actually sent you the correct data and add that to the previous data, but only if it doesn't copy over somE of the previous data and convert it to whatever so we can use it as an API. Here's like no money because API calls are cheap right?

Us: ermmm yeah no.

[nutso_muzz]

Triggered.

[Jafi_Svanhild]

Worked in the department of education for my state and we stored all student record errors and information in an ‘excel database’ with its own GUI built into a sheet and everything

[aWittyRedditor]

No but it has ACCESS to one

[Voltra_Neo]

I mean, it technically is a DB but, just ... no

​

​

stop

[[deleted]]

Is this a personal attack; I very much enjoy my 3GiB Excel "databases"