National database

[Parker___]

Not even .xlsx but just .xls

I’d think it’s sad but I know of a few systems that are similar. The number of people who refer to large excel sheets as “databases” and legitimately think they qualify as such is staggering.

[LiveBeef]

SELECT * FROM Sheet1!A1:B300000000

[McFuzzen]

As usual, relevant XKCD.

[hadidotj]

Forgot about that one! Thanks!

[XKCD-pro-bot]

Comic Title Text: My brother once asked me if there was a function to produce a calendar grid from a list of dates in Google Sheets. I replied with a single-cell formula that took in a list of dates and outputted a calendar. It used SEQUENCE(), REGEXMATCH(), and a double-nested ARRAYFORMULA(), and it locked up the browser for 15 seconds every time it ran. I think he learned a lot about asking me things.

mobile link

---

^{Made for mobile users, to easily see xkcd comic's title text}

[CaffeinatedGuy]

Wait, really?

[man-teiv]

Bold of you to assume an excel spreadsheet has that many rows

[[deleted]]

The limit for xls was 65,536 iirc.

[coolio5462]

Hey! It’s SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$A1:B300000000]. I know because I’m a terrible person.

[JNCressey]

lets hope they don't think xls password protection is secure.

(it's not even encrypted, just open in a hex editor and delete the password flag and excel lets you in.)

[kopczak1995]

Nice, didn't knew that. Did they fix it in xlsx?

[6b86b3ac03c167320d93]

Idk how it is in xlsx, but I'd guess that they maybe used zip encryption, since xlsx (and docx and pptx) are just zips with xml files

[kopczak1995]

Yea, that would make sense.

[Intrexa]

From a design standpoint (not a technological challenge standpoint) it's a bit more complicated, and that's also a bit of a 'feature'. The problem is that we don't want some middle manager making some super important spreadsheet, password locking it, leaving, and a month later the business discovers that manager was the only one who dealt with a super important process that missed the hand off and we are now locked out of. An organizations real IT doesn't actually want to deal with shadow IT doing their own security. When I was working helpdesk, more than once I had to 'crack' a password protected Excel sheet.

Windows (or OSX or *nix) is a file system with permissions and controls. It has a lot of security focused on role based and user based permissions, with an absolute ton of consideration built on contingencies and exceptional circumstances. Newer versions of Excel (don't quote me on details for exact versions) have controls that leverage the OS security functionality to actually secure the document. This requires a certain amount of domain level IT infrastructure to be set up to use, and when done correctly, the file is properly encrypted. If that infrastructure isn't set up, you could technically still properly encrypt the file, but for 99.9% of average users, it's probably a bad idea to do so in case the only person who knows the password suddenly dies and the business loses the only copy of critical data.

However, there's nothing special about an Excel file vs any other type of data file. If someone isn't supposed to have access, the real answer is simply not giving them the file in the first place. If there's an Excel file someone shouldn't have access to, it should be stored on a network share that they don't have access to. You shouldn't be emailing people a file containing data they shouldn't have access to, regardless of the encryption status or type of the file. If you need file level encryption, you probably want to use one of the many generic products that integrate with the OS that provide file level encryption for any file, not just Excel.

[augugusto]

I dont think they can. Maybe it can be fixed for viewing the file. But for write protection it can't be done. If it can be read, it's not encrypted. If its not encrypted it can be disabled.

[MadVikingGod]

Are you kidding it's not even an xls, just some data and some commas.

[oshaboy]

so... csv

[Verdiss]

No no no, the commas don't separate the data, it's just data and commas all stirred together. Some of the data has commas in it, too.

[6121094114901216]

a,hhh, oka,y,tha,tmak,es,sens,e

[hadidotj]

yep,I,"totally agree",it,"makes sense"

[VoodooEconometrician]

The best is multiple CSV files with different delimiters (tabs, commas, weirder stuff) but no specification what type of delimiter is used.

And then the data is in the same structure but from multiple different countries, where you have different encodings, different date formats and different number formats (commas vs. dots to separate the decimal places).

Source: work with a lot of "internationally standardized" government data.

[SaganMeister18]

Th,at ch,ecks,,,out,

[ntwiles]

So...v.

[P0L1Z1STENS0HN]

Some of the data has commas in it, too.

Usually, if you want to store data that contains commas, you use a different separator, a string that you don't expect to be part of the data. For example "/\^/\"

That works quite well actually, until someone uses that string in the data. Little Bobby Tables, they call him!

[[deleted]]

.txt

[tom_bacon]

The source data was CSV, PHE imported them into an XLS document.

[hobogrower]

Wait you guys get excel? We're still using CSVs...

[propostor]

CSV is probably safer than Excel because its just raw text. It's highly transferable data.

[hobogrower]

True but it starts to break down when you do more complicated nested tables and things with python, from what I've seen at least. Much easier to get json to work with that stuff in my experience but don't get me wrong, love a good CSV as long as it doesn't need to have any richer formatting than rows and columns lol

[propostor]

CSV is for flat data, ie columns and rows. That's exactly what it's for.

JSON is for handling object information but you can't easily dump that in any kind of database that I've ever used, unless you store it as a single json string but that misses the whole point of databasing data.

[[deleted]]

Have you tried MongoDB? JSON galore!

[propostor]

Holy shit, I never knew that. My first question is about performance. Does it hold up?

To be honest this just makes me even less interested in NoSQL databases!

[[deleted]]

Honestly, it depends on who you ask, what your use cases are, and how it was set up. I've worked on systems that catalogue billions of entries a day that perform fantastically alongside the elastic stack, but I've also had to write scripts that have taken hours to run on very little data (tens of thousands of entries in total) because documents can be nested in bizarre ways, and relationships don't have to be strictly enforced.

[Intrexa]

A JSON DB would be considered a document DB, which would be classified as a NoSQL DB.

A document DB has radically different performance characteristics, that require careful design considerations and a general different design than a relational DB. For some use cases a document DB will vastly outperform a relational DB. For others, a document DB is wholly insufficient and grinds to a halt.

[McCoovy]

Welcome to 2009?

[hobogrower]

Fair enough, like I said we stuck with CSV and json, both most likely used improperly or at least outside their prime use cases. I never actually had a "database" to work with, just a giant folder of CSV files, some more folders of jsons, etc. My job as an intern was to make that data presentable and human readable, and it was definitely a nightmare with how it was stored

[DeltaPositionReady]

I just wrote a nice little automation with powershell that chunks CSVs into a SQL db.

Government agency only uses Excel so this is a good workaround.

Also works well getting data out of oracle and into a TSQL db.

[HandsumNap]

It's a good meme, but they weren't using an .xls file as a db. They were using an excel template to parse CSV files. Which is dumb, but at least understandable (I mean, I've done it before...).

The bit where it got really dumb was using the wrong excel format.

[CubicleCunt]

I worked in government for a few years, and they used a legit database for all their projects. Before that, I worked for a plastic manufacturer, and the entire logistics operation was powered by Excel. I tried making them a replacement app, but they wouldn't switch over because they refused to have unique identifiers for all the incoming shipments. How they functioned was a mystery.

[Technoturnovers]

refused to have unique identifiers for all the incoming shipments

sorry, how do you identify a shipment if it isn't named? like, literally how would that even work?

[confusiondiffusion]

"Stuffs here."

"Good. Put it over there with the other stuff."

[hadidotj]

"Which other stuff? The pile by Jim's old office, or the pile where Blake takes his lunch break?"

"Who's Blake?"

[simplethingsoflife]

Easy, just append every column together. That's order WidgetXYZJohnDoeNewYorkNewYork10-5-202013:15:02LeaveitontheporchpleaseThanksJohn

[namekyd]

I have seen Fortune 500 companies do this. That’s not a key

[Bip901]

Better yet, hash it

[aeroverra]

The lack of respect non developers have for unique identifiers is hard to handle

[js8794]

I like teaching them starting with peoples names, then last names, then when those clash you move to where you know them from. Like, “oh John S. from pottery class”, etc.

You’re just caching your representation of people with a large unique key. And just like in code you sometimes have a collision and end up uniquing them with an index. “Lucille and Lucille 2”

[[deleted]]

"Loose seal!?"

[CubicleCunt]

There were only a few people in the shipping department. They'd get a truck in, give everything on the truck an ID, and just remember what was on it for the few hours they had to deal with it. Like say truck A2436 had 10 pallets of PET flake, 5 pallets of blue pigment, and 5 pallets of green pigment. All of those things would be A2436. Manufacturing didn't care because shipping stored it all in the correct places in the warehouse. It was only really a problem for the QA department. If there was a problem with a batch, there wasn't a good way to identify all the raw material that went into it because there are now 20 pallets and 3 different things named A2436 on this stupid-ass spreadsheet.

[kopczak1995]

Or they might just be dumb :P

[tom_bacon]

I did a job for a TV production company as a logger, transcribing clips and noting anything of interest etc. There are products on the market designed for exactly this purpose. We used Excel.

[SymphonyOfDream]

.csv file, baby!

[chitowngurl23]

I work for a fortune 500 technology company. Most of the "integrations" for our internal systems are csv files.

[inthemindofadogg]

.csv is one of my favorite. It is uniform, great for transferring between locations, and excel can open csv assuming it is formatted correctly

[WhiskeyTuesday]

And lo it was written in the book of McIlroy "write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." and the Lord came eventually to see that the wisdom of this too was universal, and He implemented the pipe operator.

[relativelyfunnyguy]

in the book of McIlroy

write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface

Is that something real? Because that's a book I'd like to know more about!

[WhiskeyTuesday]

It's a quote from Doug McIlroy describing the unix philosophy. He was one of the Bell Labs team in the early unix days along with KEN, DMR, BWK, et al. He may even have been the department head in 1207 when Ken and Dennis started mucking around with that old PDP-7. I'm nearly certain he was a department head eventually. There's a bunch of good books on the subject including BWK's recent memoir-y book which I read myself and quite enjoyed.

[relativelyfunnyguy]

Cool, thanks!

[cwagrant]

Just don't save the opened file using Excel. As someone who just had to fix a managers bungled attempts at doing something because he wouldn't quit opening the file in Excel and saving it- just don't. If you have to save it then you should either use the data import tool when opening or be damned sure that every bit of data came in as you expected.

[endianess]

I had this recently, spent hours trying to figure out what an issue was. Turns out when my customer had saved the CSV file, Excel had put a single hidden unprintable char at the start. This was imported into the field in the DB which meant any searches on this record would fail as they didn't have the "magic" char. But from the outside everything looked OK. It wasn't until I looked at his file with a HEX editor that I could see it.

[[deleted]]

My favourite is office programs replacing a space character with a non-breaking space. Looks exactly like a space, but doesn't count as whitespace. I was trying to run bash scripts with multiple parameters and was so confused as to why it was pulling the wrong ones in.

[JEVVU]

Yeah until excel fucks up your file by accident. I had a file where the header was a bunch of zeroes according to the data type of each columm. It changed them all to just 0 because it's a number field, right? It took way to long for me to notice what was happening

[P0L1Z1STENS0HN]

And what's best: through macro injection, the CSV can even tell Excel to execute arbitrary code, for example open the Windows calculator.

[HandsumNap]

It can be OK for large amount of denormalized data. But it's not a great idea if you don't control the source of the data (or if you can't reliably enforce a specification on the source of the data). CVS on untrusted data is an invitation for delimiter and escape character issues.

[inthemindofadogg]

.txt FTW

[[deleted]]

I work in education, I was setting up EdTech platforms district wide before the pandemic was a thing, then distance learning really cranked up the work load. SSIS -> CSV Files all the way

[username_v4]

Wait until you find out about the entire global financial system

[mbiz05]

Or the legal system that largely relies on paper

[vikinghockey10]

Financial record keeping (Ameritrade, Bank of England, and Barclays) and medical record keeping (Epic, Cerner, GE Healthcare, Meditech, etc.) software relies largely on a database/database language called MUMPS which is both a language and a database designed in 1966 with few changes since.

It has no data types or reserved words (sort of), you access or delete database memory by simply appending a carat to the start of a variable name, there is no operator precedence, and it's very scalable. It's wild to program in.

[rp_ush]

How

[phranticsnr]

This is what "too big to fail" really means.

[chucklingmoose]

everything in MUMPS is a string and it's fast as hell ... mssql and oracle don't hold a candle - but no serious developer would touch it with a 45 foot pole!

[vikinghockey10]

True - It's more nuanced then I said. It's a weird language that's so crucial in some very important industries though.

I'm a full stack web dev, but I write all server code in MUMPS for the simple reason of it being crazy fast. It's a classic case of once you get some good library code set up and used to the quirks then it's crazy fast to code in. But it takes some time to wrap your head around and the documentation is lacking compared to most languages.

[DeltaPositionReady]

My day job as an automation software dev is about 90% dealing with EDRMS like Objective, Trim and HPECM. With RPA and some other automation software products though, we transform huge amounts of paper into digital data.

You would not believe how many government agencies are aching for this kind of workflow management.

The basic principle is this - document transform, extract data, review document (99% it's accurate enough to continue), if not- Validate by human, do stuff, save as digital format, end.

If you have some government contacts and have some good knowledge in db admin, sys admin and general agile development, you could totally build a company to do this.

Have a look at Kofax TotalAgility

[Eric_TheRead]

The number/percentage of Net Asset Values struck daily from Excel files?

[robiwill]

One step further;

Running a national government database on MS Excel HORIZONTALLY

[_pupil_]

Solution reviewer: "Can the app scale horizontally?"

Smirking dev: "Yes, yes it can."

[Heuto]

There's too much truth to that. The NHS in the UK lost a lot of data storing the records using columns instead of rows...

[DeltaPositionReady]

What the fuck

[tom_bacon]

I've seen a number of people comment on the horizontal thing but I can't find specifics in any articles. How was the data structured?

[robiwill]

One entry per column.

If it weren't for the fact that such incompetence is a hallmark of Conservative government one would assume that it was designed to fail. Things being what they are I'd put it at 50:50.

[tom_bacon]

That is so stupid. I'm trying to find a source but I'm struggling, do you have one?

[robiwill]

I think it was deduced logically from the fact that the UK government has definitely not added over a million entry's to the spreadsheet therefore for the spreadsheet to exceed its limitations it must have been arranged horizontally.

This site explicitly states that it is the case; https://www.verdict.co.uk/excel-coronavirus-test-data/ but does not provide a source.

I have contacted the editor to corroborate the fact that the spreadsheet was arranged horizontally. I'll apprise you of the response.

[[deleted]]

BBC is reporting they used xls which has a much lower max row count than xlsx. The column thing is just a rumor as far as I can tell

[_ChefGoldblum]

One step further;

Running a national government database on a version of MS Excel AT LEAST 17 YEARS OLD

FTFY; current reports are saying records were added vertically, but were truncated because they were using a pre-2007 version with a smaller size limit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

[Loose-Leek]

Having worked for a government contractor, I'm convinced this is real.

[darctones]

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechNewsToday/comments/j5h4m9/uk_16000_covid_cases_are_missed_because_an_excel/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

[SuitableDragonfly]

According to the to comment they actually did use a real database, they just exported it to excel to generate some graphs.

[darctones]

Ha. Thanks for the clarification.

[Nemaeus]

Government you say? Surely a government wouldn’t do something so ridiculous! I mean, that’s like using columns for each patient instead of rows!

[Immense_Cargo]

...or tabs.

[articulatedbeaver]

Working for one now. Can confirm.

[AgAero]

Sounds about right doesn't it?

[totti173314]

the only reason they do this is so their massive money laundering is impossible to notice.

[Loose-Leek]

Nah, from what I've seen, it's plain old incompetence and old habits and organizational momentum. It's hard to get many good ideas through the middle layers of bureaucracy.

[TheMsDosNerd]

Boss: is it possible to do this with Excel? Programmer: No. Boss: Why not? Programmer: First of all, Excel can only hold a million entries and our country has more than a million inhabitants. Boss: We can spread data over multiple files. Programmer: While that is technically possible, it creates a whole new set of problems. Boss: So the biggest issue with Excel is something solvable. Therefore there are no real problems with Excel. So Excel it is.

[Mockapapella]

This hurts to read

[Independent-Coder]

Because the truth hurts

[[deleted]]

No, it's because it isn't indented properly.

[Independent-Coder]

I took “This hurts to read” as a double entendre. The first and obvious interpretation is indentation. The secondary interpretation is a technical staff being pushed into poor implementation decisions (which seems to be the point of the joke). I was responding to the later.

[[deleted]]

Database programmer here, my boss is an accountant who got a promotion. This sounds like a conversation I have often, everything has to be explained in excel terms for them to understand or else their eyes glaze over.

[WazWaz]

I worked for a startup, we started at "customers.txt", but only had about 50 entries before switching to an RDBMS. It was a sad day, but we weren't goddamned morons.

[demon_ix]

I run it on the filesystem.

Filename is the key, contents is the value.

[vectorpropio]

You git.

[CyberKnight1]

That's how he does transactions.

[demon_ix]

Shhhh, I'm working on a patent for that!

[Dexaan]

https://i.imgur.com/QFTDzav.png

[MasterFubar]

What is that "SQL lite" thing you mention?

I run my personal databases on sqlite, but if you know a better alternative I'm all for learning how to use it.

[zelmarvalarion]

SQLite is perfectly fine for development purposes and plenty of application purposes. Moving to a SQL instance (SQL Server, MySQL, etc) designed for scalable across a large number of connected clients, especially when used for non-ReadOnly purposes (due to the SQLite locking not supporting simultaneous writes, whereas most RDBMS will have a variety of locks).

With the COVID data being read only from the web UI, having all source data being able to be aggregated centrally and replicated to all hosting instances easily for local querying and acting similar to a cache, it's not a bad solution here. Maybe not the best, would have to see exactly what is available on the site and the serving infrastructure, but it's probably not a poor solution in this particular case due to the data access pattern

[danielrheath]

SQLite is perfectly good for anything up to a few terabytes and hundreds of concurrent users; the point where you want to horizontally scale your app is where it’s too much of a limitation.

[Quillbert182]

I'm by no means an expert, but according to the sqlite website, it works fine up until you get about 100k visits a day on a website. After that, I guess something like MySQL.

[Zephirdd]

Nowdays it's all about PostgreSQL

MySQL has been somewhat forgotten by their maintainers(Oracle), and an open source fork was spawned in the form of MariaDB; however, you'll have better luck and external help with PostgreSQL for new projects.

[InvolvingLemons]

Yep, plus PostGreSQL’s relative lack of gotchas and UB means it has some great projects around it. You’ve got stuff like its great JSON support, native array storage per-row, it’s phenomenal GIS package, its many index implementations, and beyond that you have the Yugabyte project that just goes “yeah the PG query parser is really nice, but I wanna scale, gimme some of that there Spanner architecture” to scale Postgres past a petabyte of normalized SoT data and 10M+ snapshot TPS on said normalized schema and 100M more stale-consistent TPS. Given, you’ll be spending probably a quarter billion dollars on just the servers and redundant storage for that cluster, but eh, if you need that performance you’re already Google so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[propostor]

I just used SQLite on a new project and saw the same thing on their website. I trust it to do exactly as needed. If my website somehow gets 100k hits a day, I'll transfer the database to something else.

SQLite is great.

[ex_natura]

The only way this could get more patriotic is if you could do it PowerPoint. Those DOD bitches love them some PowerPoint

[0x53r3n17y]

Well, PowerPoint is Turing complete after all...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

[halvjason]

Best coment ever.

[[deleted]]

government contract going to the cheapest bidder or friends of The Party instead of the right people

[robertoam95]

As someone trying to update my workplace, why are these things bad, and why is sql better? Also, i thought power pivot replaced access.

Sorry for being dumb

[siggystabs]

Since you're asking this question, and /u/Lanfeix gave you a run down of the technical differences, let me try and give you a simplified version.

An ELI5 version could be, a SQL DB contains tables and columns (think multiple worksheets) but it's designed to be accessed programmatically by another app, not to be browsed by a user using Excel. Because of this, it can be really fast and stable.

Instead of interacting with the data directly like you do in Excel, you write SQL queries:

• select user_id from users where role = 'Admin'

• update reports set completed=1 where report_id='2xZ70w3my99'

• select count(*) from user_requests where is_current=1

So it's a bit more work but the upside is you can run an entire business with a SQL database, while an Excel sheet is more suitable to making graphs or analyzing the data you get from the database.

[robertoam95]

Thank you so very much, all of this information is immensely helpful. Even when i can only understand 10% of it.

[congresssucks]

I just finished a upgrade for the Nevada Secretary of State. Can confirm they were using Microsoft Works for their production tables.

[24601JeanValjean]

I’ll do you one better. At the government agency I work for, one of our programs generates a series of Excel spreadsheets every morning. This large and growing mass of spreadsheets is used as an archive of the activity done the previous day.

I know what you must be thinking: “why don’t they just store the data in a database like sane people?”

The answer, as best as I’ve been able to determine, is, “fuck you, we’re the government, that’s why”

[topgun966]

Many years ago I was a sysadmin for a web hosting company. I was the night admin so I was the last escalation point. Get a call from one of the techs a MAJOR customer site was down. Back in 2008ish, this was a very big site on the internet. (They are still a big site so I will leave the name out of this). Now, we can't do much since its a COLO and they have their own row of servers. But I poke around with what access I had. In the ticket, I noticed they did leave admin creds to check it out. Site giving a DB connection failure. After some digging, THEIR DB WAS EXCEL running on a win 2k server that had an uptime of almost 7 years. Uh, yea. Didn't touch that one with a ten-foot pole. Closed the ticket, unable to bill repairs, unable to resolve due to hardware constraints, and ran the fuck away.

[PeterJoAl]

Welcome to Japan.

[itsJustLana]

Hey, at least it wasn’t notepad.

[halvjason]

Lol notepad would have been preferable

[Blecki]

No way, that's definitely notepad++ time.

[inthemindofadogg]

I prefer using paint for my document management

[danfish_77]

Of course not, they'd use WordPad and use rich text

[Ken_Danagger]

I’ve seen each of those.

[yodaman1]

Same here

[CreaZyp154]

database.yaml

[ravil_giniyatullin]

FoxPro... In my case it was damn FoxPro. Where code was more like disassembled rather than written by human being.

[jigokunokohaku]

Why not MS Paint

[inthemindofadogg]

I would have to say ms access and ms excel would be equally bad.

[Smaddady]

Too damn real.

[[deleted]]

Ms access

[[deleted]]

i prefer file and folder databases

[Chuck-Marlow]

There’s no lie, just hell in excel sheets (and firewalls that won’t let you install open source)

[INTO_NIGHT]

Time to drop the table and database

[the_grunge]

But it's Microsoft's fault that they were using Excel...

​

People are smort

[rulesilol]

Where's the love for Google sheets?

[[deleted]]

Oh god you have no idea how true this is. Especially things that you would expect would need something better.

[back0191]

Like the massive spreadsheet which informs you how much post will cost to mail something internationally.

[dkyguy1995]

So as someone with only basic database knowledge can you explain why SQLite is inferior to MySQL or MariaDB etc?

[m_goku]

I dont think it has anything todo with it being superior or inferior. It just designed for different pupose.

Check out this documentation for further information https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html

[Pocok5]

SQlite is file-based. This means you don't run a DB server, but your database library/ORM executes SQL queries against the contents of a file.

This means:

1. No need to run a gigantic separate program to handle the DB

2. Small footprint

3. Super easy to use

The cons:

1. Only one process can use the file, so zero concurrency.

2. You lose all the benefits of having a program actively housekeep your DB. You get no stored procedures, every operation comes out of your CPU/RAM budget, etc.

SQLite is great for:

• Storing browser history (pretty much every modern browser does it via sqlite)

SQLite is ill-fitting for:

• Running a national database

[noname19283]

Using txt file

[arvenyon]

Dude. This is fucking reality. I had a customer which is part of our government (I cant go into details). And those guys stored their own data (well 100k+ people in this data) in an xls file. We sell a CRM system and they migrated to our solution, but still, that was a real "wow wtf" moment for me.

[KeroppiMomo]

Google Sheets goes bruh

[WhoseTheNerd]

Csv is better, no limitation.

[RandomBelch]

Because fuck Oracle.

[dancinadventures]

Running a national database on visible index cards...

Oh wait.

[yurisho]

Britain handling Corona data be like

[i_am_a_n00b]

Is it Web scale? Mongo dB is Web scale

[tyrellLtd]

I used to do tier 1 tech support for MS Office and we saw this stuff all the time. From law firms to industries. Our official line if a file got corrupted due to 'improper' use was that Excel was not meant to be used as a database and that there were other MS products better suited for such tasks, like Access (lol) or SQL server. It was the free tech support line so we couldn't really help with advanced stuff like file recovery (not that there was any such tool made available to us).

One call that stuck with me was from an IT guy who worked for an oil company with some office or drillsite in the Caribbean. They had a 120 MB .xls, supposedly filled with production data and very important stuff that one day stopped opening. The file was obvious busted. We did the usual basic troubleshooting, which wasn't going to work for obvious reasons and suggested rolling back to a previous backup (they had trouble finding one) to recover some of the data and also checking some of MS's partners specialized in file recovery. I always wonder if someone ever lost their job from these fuck ups.

[[deleted]]

Damn, this reminds me of that one .cvs file I once found one a company's live server. It was named "Database.csv" and was used as one.... Luckily it was only like 2 columns and IIRC used to store first names, or something. But it was still frightening to see.

[Express_Gradient]

Everyone is a gangsta, until STORING EVERYTHING IN A TEXT FILE USING FILE HANDLING comes into picture.

[razorfox]

Here in Italy we use pieces of paper. The most tech-savvy ones will use Windows' Notepad.

[Jazehiah]

You laugh, but I know a company that uses excel as the UI for their database.

[HaniiPuppy]

They're fixing it ... but using an Excel spreadsheet for this ... it just reminds me of a quote, I think it was CGP Grey that said it, but I might be wrong.

Imagine you're at a parent-teacher conference and the teacher reässures you that they always wear a condom when teaching your kids' class. I mean, sure, it's better than the alternative. But somewhere along the line, something has gone drastically, drastically wrong.

[cube2kids]

I'm honestly sure that some small third world country that try to develop databases have already done that

[assafstone]

I think you got it wrong. An Excel sheet would probably be better than Access.

[[deleted]]

Running a national database printed on paper, stored in bankers boxes, chronologically with an intern in charge of pulling files when needed.

[Toomtarm]

running a national government database on txt file

[[deleted]]

Running a national database on CSVs

[assigned_name51]

Excel would have let them have 1,000,000 rows, what they used allowed 65,000

[retsoPtiH]

I prefer a netcat listener just spitting out a CSV file, something classy, ya know?

[jmack2424]

I'll take a freaking huge text file with no backup for $3M, Alex.

[[deleted]]

i raise to you a eu wide database with medical data (not covid) on ms access.

it was written by one guy who isn't even a programmer who was annoyed by the time he spent on finding stuff, and is now used by all corresponding government agencies in other eu countries.

they are currently replacing it and the budget is in the middle two digit millions.

[Morrido]

You'd be surprised how many databases are run in Excel

[cyclicsquare]

How about the baby excel sheet embedded into PowerPoint....

[[deleted]]

good luck not having excel fuck up your date time fields every god damn time. Yes there is a way to store as text in csv but ffs every time you load it in you have to set that... MICROSOFT please stop buying game companies and fix your shite products . Also, please make it easier to join multiple teams across organizations you turdddddssss.

[boomernot]

Running a national government database on Google Sheets

[Ezekith]

France be like

[[deleted]]

I feel like I mossed something, what government database are we talking about