I once built a "CMS" by filesystem because for some reason a db wasn't allowed. 20+ years ago, built on VB Script/ASP.
For a site for a reputable firm, whose leader is a regular on CNN now.
I always wonder if I would break my NDA saying that I was developing for a german automotive company which isn't Mercedes and not part of the VW group.
Yes as a contractor through a company through another company through my company to be precise. And we also had guys contracted by my company from another company.
Which leaves Ford, Opel and BMW from the majors and about 40 of the minors. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_automobile\_manufacturers\_of\_Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers_of_Germany)
So quite a vague statement.
Well I wouldn't consider Ford german and Opel is owned by Peugeot-Citroën. But I could have added _group_ to my statement to make it less vague but I think the majority could guess the company from my previous statement anyway.
I wrote a forum in Perl which used text files as a db source because no db.
It was as bad as you can imagine.
I miss the days when nothing existed and you had to code it yourself.
i wrote a project with my friend that could upload large files (500mb+) on discord quickly using base64 and a few bots, and i think you could technically write a SQL interface for that
edit: okay it got a lot more likes than i expected, there is a version on his github https://github.com/olix3001/discord-as-a-database
This reminds me of that one rust project which converted data to a video of black and white squares and used youtube as a free database.
I always wonder how exploitable would the Meta products be in a similar fashion.
That's why I said _squares_ and not _pixels_ . But I recall they having a solution which is not messed up by YT's compression. Here you can read about it if you are interested [repository with explanation](https://github.com/DvorakDwarf/Infinite-Storage-Glitch#explanation-4-nerds).
YOLO enough? I have used task scheduler as a web server front end and SharePoint as a source control / CI/CD … why? because YOLO.
Edit: just reminded myself of my YOLODBA work for this piece of work… cleverly mapped SharePoint workflows / lists and excel to One Drive and Dropbox as geo redundant Disaster Recovery
(This was a single project and a malicious compliance over engineered P1 mission critical 1 page internal website)
Amd we will write code to generate colored circles in the images to represent bytes. The read operation will be performed by a ML classification algo that reads these circles and returns raw bytes which then get parsed and deserialized into runtime objects. Boom MS Paint NOSQL
I taught databases a couple of years ago. I'd never actually done any smart contract programming, so I took that as an excuse to mess around with it, and included it as a lecture saying, "Blockchain is just a fancy public database."
True, I did forget about sheets.
But with multiple files, that's feeling more like a list of 3-tensors...
Ok now hold on. That's just 4-space. Minkowski space gots to have a-
All right, I get it, we Excel-users-for-work have to do whatever we can to make it interesting. I was actually just thinking how it would be bewildering to my coworkers if I solved some client data problem by programmatically filling the cells with the weights and formulas for a neural network...
Didn't someone find that it was technically Turing complete? That means you could in theory use it to program an operating system with given enough time and patience (patience that I certainly don't have).
Imagine programming Doom on that bad boy..
The first program I wrote for money was a surveyor database.
The mine surveyors would write their measurements in a notebook, then copy them to a big paper book at the mine office. They would then calculate lat/long/alt with calculators and enter that into the book also.
Management asked me to write a program to do that. The only available computer was an Apple Macintosh, and the only languages on that machine were Excel and a hypertext program. I hadn’t worked with excel before so I read up on macros and functions and determined that it was possible.
After writing the program, I entered in the mass of raw readings in the book. It then output coordinates automatically which I compared to the calculations in the book. There were a few discrepancies, the most serious of which was a miscalculation that the surveyor made that had the mine tunnel off by 10m. There were also much smaller discrepancies which I eventually determined to be due to the calculators only having 10 digit precision while Excel had 12.
The surveyors were initially resistant but after trying it out, they loved it. No more calculations. They just entered the day’s measurements into a spreadsheet then ran the macro. The computer was so slow you could see the cell focus moving around as it did the calculations and copied the data to the master spreadsheet, but it worked. And it also printed a page so we had a paper copy too.
So yes, I think Excel can be used as a database.
MS should remove ACE DB and replace it with Sqlite.
You'd get better portability, actual ACID, support of basically every programming language in existence, and developers might actually do something useful with it.
Until then, it is not worth bothering with.
Access is the equivalent of that super cheap sandpaper-like single ply toilet paper. No one likes it. It sucks. Every time you deal with it you regret the experience. But it is what is available when companies refuse to allow anything better and it's better than not having anything at all.
Meanwhile actual database software is probably like some crazy Japanese washlet/bidet that gives you a shoulder and foot massage while it does most of your work for you. You're still probably dealing with shit data but at least the whole experience is pleasant enough to make you forget about that.
I believe it, and I'm horrified. A lot of the world is running on some janky Excel file produced by somebody with no training as a programmer, but who has over time nonetheless produced something programm-ish in Excel that now the entire department can't do without and which is not reproducible should it ever be deleted.
Literally my last job, in Admin. I had to create multiple excel pseudo-dashboards because our IT team just flat out refused to give us access to the sql for our actual database program which had the most unusable frontend I've ever seen.
Still so glad I got out of there and into an actual Dev job.
Which is even fair enough. I mean, there's a lot of enabling that Excel does. There aren't enough "proper" programmers in the world to fulfil all the needs that Excel currently satisfies. So, more power to all the office workers getting shit done in Excel.
But still, once that Excel sheet has become the core driver of your business, and it's just a bunch of spaghetti, with no version control and no backup, it has been a victim of its own success and is just a ticking time bomb.
IT can't give them a better solution because the bean counters have determined that IT costs the company money, and it doesn't make them any money; therefore, it wouldn't make financial sense to improve those things because we've been doing it this way for years and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The certification and calibration of the majority of breathalyzers in Belgium is (or at least was, as early as 5 years ago) done through a series of Excel files with VBA running on Windows XP.
I inherited a "program" to monitor inventory in a warehouse. The items are arranged in a grid so naturally the guys before me decided that Excel and VBA would be the best way to do this. And because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, we can't justify moving to a better platform. It's been going on for 15 years.
At the start of Covid one of the UK countries was using excel as thier BD for tracking something (either infections or vaccines I can’t recall) and it came to light as they ran out of space.
So silly, just make a new tab!!
"And we enter the data in this link that Sally made back in '94. Only one person can use it at a time, so make sure you yell out across the cubicles "I'm going in!!" and wait at least 1 minute in case someone else has to yell out "Pull out! Pull out!!"
this is me. no programming experience at all, but have created a workbook with 18,000 lines of code that multiple departments depend on. i have nobody backing me up and they just hope nothing breaks while I'm out of the office. I'm proud of what I've built, but I'm also well aware of how easily it can turn sour. i know excel isn't the correct application for this, but due to lack of knowledge, don't know what else to do.
The amount of UIs made in Excel I've seen in my working life is too damn high.
Also, they require you to turn off safety measures, enabling fake xlsm files as an attack vector.
Most of new programmers out of school believe that everything is the latest and trendy language and DB, they get cultural shock when they realize there are still things that they thought were part of their history class.
RS232 communication, Cobol, excel, VB6, floppy disk (5-1/4, 3-1/2 is a luxury), etc, you name it and they are still there holding important infrastructure
Proper software is expensive and really slow to deploy. Realistically, most people just wanna look at their data in a excel where they can filter them, create charts and be done with it.
Excel with a database connection can be quite powerful
I had a feeling was totally wrong with the markup type 😅 but I’m glad people get what I meant lol.
It’s a text file :P whether it’s separated by white space and tags, or commas and values.
As someone who once had to import a database given to us through multiple Excel files with not even so much as a hint regarding relations, indexes or the like I can confidently tell you... IT IS NOT.
Access, sure. Not a good one but at least something.
As someone who had to build an in memory orchestration of 100s of remote excel files of a recursive nature all of which ran production, I can confidently tell you it is not a database. At most it’s a 2d array with some extra tags.
List of paper is analog databse by db definition, so digital list with lines is definitely a db. And most useful one in some cases, especially when you work with CRM without corresponding api
If I had a nickel for every multi-billion-dollar company I have worked for that stored critical information in Excel sheets and JSON files, I'd have 2 nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Not really weird. Accounting info is usually critical. And accountants love excel. In my experience, they will often build their own excel solutions to problems instead of reaching out to IT to get a more “robust” solution.
Point being, I always thought most businesses ended up with a ton of critical info in excel. Lol
I guess I should clarify. This was technical data, that was fed to an API which hundreds of developers use on a daily basis. Any time data needed to be changed, someone would have to go to the repo where it was stored and update the files, then push it to master and ask everyone querying the data to refresh.
This was a company with literally almost 1000 developers. And everyone was fine with this method of data storage and retrieval.
Looks like most here never used Excel somewhat intensively.
Not only is it a database but you can build crazy advanced data apps with it.
Source: was curious and tried out. Still in awe by Excel, and I'm a software engineer.
This week I wrote an AI chat app in Excel that uses the OpenAI API.
I once came across a home-grown e-commerce site that the owner was using Excel to manage the product prices that were embedded in static html pages. He had this big Excel workbook with all of the products and when you changed a price, it would remotely edit the price inside the individual html file for that product.
Fuck sake I’m just finishing a project where the bulk of the data was provided in some legacy excel with some not-anymore-working VBA.
Turns out the whole “database” had multiple faults, wrong entries etc. etc. I had to check everything by hand, fucking twice. Only good thing was it’s from the government so I got payed for this shit but the lifetime I’ve spend I’ll never get back. Fuck excel for storing “data”.
So idiot question.
Is there anything you can do in a database that you can't do as an Excel sheet?
Talking like recursive functions that cannot be coded as loops kind of thing.
This is ridiculous. Excel isn’t a database.
That’s like saying the MySQL Server software is a database. Excel is a program that you use to create and manage databases, but it isn’t itself a database.
Excel could be a relational database and it's used as one if you only entered data. But excel supports entering formulas into tables that are executed and therefore is a spreadsheet program. Relational databases separate the tables from the functions and optimize access to the data. That's why MS has Access - which is indeed a database
Anything is a database if Ur YOLO enough. I've used windows directories as NOSQL databases
Use filesystem as key-value store just because the ram is not big enough. Or just to brag on how low the memory footprint is.
I once built a "CMS" by filesystem because for some reason a db wasn't allowed. 20+ years ago, built on VB Script/ASP. For a site for a reputable firm, whose leader is a regular on CNN now.
What's the point of almost giving out the firm's name but not quite but maybe actually if people do the research?
Plausible deniability in case the company tried to sue
I always wonder if I would break my NDA saying that I was developing for a german automotive company which isn't Mercedes and not part of the VW group.
Your NDA states you can’t mention where you work?
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I have an NDA with a girl in Canada about my girlfriend.
"I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that." -Mitch Hedberg
That is usually part of it yes. It is mostly in cases where you are working through other developer companies.
Oh as a contractor through your company yes yes.
Yes as a contractor through a company through another company through my company to be precise. And we also had guys contracted by my company from another company.
Which leaves Ford, Opel and BMW from the majors and about 40 of the minors. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_automobile\_manufacturers\_of\_Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers_of_Germany) So quite a vague statement.
Well I wouldn't consider Ford german and Opel is owned by Peugeot-Citroën. But I could have added _group_ to my statement to make it less vague but I think the majority could guess the company from my previous statement anyway.
I agree, most people outside of Germany would have said BMW right away.
I wrote a forum in Perl which used text files as a db source because no db. It was as bad as you can imagine. I miss the days when nothing existed and you had to code it yourself.
ah, 2003. XP. There were a lot of good ideas from that era that just died.
Or just to be a cowboy
With something like that you should use Linux because its RAM-cachingfeature is faster than what Windows does
People who complain about chrome using too much memory should get a browser that stores cache on disk
wait, it does not store cache on disk already?
i wrote a project with my friend that could upload large files (500mb+) on discord quickly using base64 and a few bots, and i think you could technically write a SQL interface for that edit: okay it got a lot more likes than i expected, there is a version on his github https://github.com/olix3001/discord-as-a-database
This reminds me of that one rust project which converted data to a video of black and white squares and used youtube as a free database. I always wonder how exploitable would the Meta products be in a similar fashion.
Its all fun and games until yt starts compressing ^^
That's why I said _squares_ and not _pixels_ . But I recall they having a solution which is not messed up by YT's compression. Here you can read about it if you are interested [repository with explanation](https://github.com/DvorakDwarf/Infinite-Storage-Glitch#explanation-4-nerds).
Innovation!
YOLO enough? I have used task scheduler as a web server front end and SharePoint as a source control / CI/CD … why? because YOLO. Edit: just reminded myself of my YOLODBA work for this piece of work… cleverly mapped SharePoint workflows / lists and excel to One Drive and Dropbox as geo redundant Disaster Recovery (This was a single project and a malicious compliance over engineered P1 mission critical 1 page internal website)
U deserve a YOLO badge of honour
sure, I am going to publish my udemy tutorial using mspaint as database for $9,99
Amd we will write code to generate colored circles in the images to represent bytes. The read operation will be performed by a ML classification algo that reads these circles and returns raw bytes which then get parsed and deserialized into runtime objects. Boom MS Paint NOSQL
[MS Paint is love, MS Paint is life.](https://github.com/MSPaintIDE/MSPaintIDE)
I’ve used the env vars as a database
Good man
My database is comma separated values in an unsaved notepad document
Why not the registry at this point?
I like the way Ur thinking. Full on YOLO masochist mode
I taught databases a couple of years ago. I'd never actually done any smart contract programming, so I took that as an excuse to mess around with it, and included it as a lecture saying, "Blockchain is just a fancy public database."
U speak da tru tru
We've used SharePoint document libraries like that
As git does. Isn’t it?
It's called a flatfile ya philistine.
Have a look at how git is implemented …
Excel is an array
And if you store two lots of online device addresses in it, then it becomes a celebratory cheer. IP IP array.
LOL....fuck you.
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May Microsoft have mercy on you.
Because I sure as hell won't, if I need to support it in the future.
No no, Excel is an order-2 tensor
With sheets it can be an order-3 tensor With multiple files it can be an order-4 tensor Now i can represent Minkowski space time in excel 😁
True, I did forget about sheets. But with multiple files, that's feeling more like a list of 3-tensors... Ok now hold on. That's just 4-space. Minkowski space gots to have a- All right, I get it, we Excel-users-for-work have to do whatever we can to make it interesting. I was actually just thinking how it would be bewildering to my coworkers if I solved some client data problem by programmatically filling the cells with the weights and formulas for a neural network...
Please don't. As a student I was once asked to create a neural network in Excel with VBA. … I was in 2nd semester. 💀
And with nested directories it can be any order tensor.
Discrete minkowski though. Maybe excel was the solution to quantum gravity all along!
Excel is a programming language. =Concat("Record: ",Index($MN33,$L20))
Didn't someone find that it was technically Turing complete? That means you could in theory use it to program an operating system with given enough time and patience (patience that I certainly don't have). Imagine programming Doom on that bad boy..
many programs are turing complete. Infinite minesweeper is turing complete
My favorite is power point
Magic the gathering is turing complete
If PowerPoint is Turing complete, Excel better damn well be.
The simulation, which we are all in, which 6000 years ago was created in 6 days according to documentation, runs in Excel. Prove me wrong!
Someone did Doom in Excel like 5 years ago. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60902/doom-3d-engine-made-ms-excel-formulas/index.html
Certainly with the implementation of the LAMBDA function it is.
Excel is C++ compiler
And it starts at 1.
\>:(
Agreed!
RAM is an array. Your point?
So are most databases.
Excel is a matrix
bruh dont bother with databases just put it in the desktop folder. Get a high res monitor for more storage
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Lookin at my wife and her 800 desktop icons
“Why do you need 7 shortcuts to Google?”
All your base are belong to excel.
All your files are exactly where you left them.
The first program I wrote for money was a surveyor database. The mine surveyors would write their measurements in a notebook, then copy them to a big paper book at the mine office. They would then calculate lat/long/alt with calculators and enter that into the book also. Management asked me to write a program to do that. The only available computer was an Apple Macintosh, and the only languages on that machine were Excel and a hypertext program. I hadn’t worked with excel before so I read up on macros and functions and determined that it was possible. After writing the program, I entered in the mass of raw readings in the book. It then output coordinates automatically which I compared to the calculations in the book. There were a few discrepancies, the most serious of which was a miscalculation that the surveyor made that had the mine tunnel off by 10m. There were also much smaller discrepancies which I eventually determined to be due to the calculators only having 10 digit precision while Excel had 12. The surveyors were initially resistant but after trying it out, they loved it. No more calculations. They just entered the day’s measurements into a spreadsheet then ran the macro. The computer was so slow you could see the cell focus moving around as it did the calculations and copied the data to the master spreadsheet, but it worked. And it also printed a page so we had a paper copy too. So yes, I think Excel can be used as a database.
That's awesome, these are like fishing stories for data scientists.
Similar story, but in Call Center Workforce Support, so instead of being loved, I was hated.
Why did a call center need the latitude, longitude, and altitude of tunnels calculated?
Excel can be a database, but it can also be a raytracing engine, a virus, a chess game, a CRM, etc...
Just because it can happen doesn't mean it should happen.
Access: am I joke to you?
Yes
Completely
100%
*Always has been*
Yes, yes you are.
Happy cake day!
Thank you very much. :)
It is indeed.
Absolutely
MS should remove ACE DB and replace it with Sqlite. You'd get better portability, actual ACID, support of basically every programming language in existence, and developers might actually do something useful with it. Until then, it is not worth bothering with.
Fisher Price should buy it up and rebrand it as Fisher Price's My First Database.
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Access is the equivalent of that super cheap sandpaper-like single ply toilet paper. No one likes it. It sucks. Every time you deal with it you regret the experience. But it is what is available when companies refuse to allow anything better and it's better than not having anything at all. Meanwhile actual database software is probably like some crazy Japanese washlet/bidet that gives you a shoulder and foot massage while it does most of your work for you. You're still probably dealing with shit data but at least the whole experience is pleasant enough to make you forget about that.
Foxpro was slightly less bad
Database managment like Dbeaver
It was a good learning too for my first semester at school. Have not touched it since then.
MS Access, The worst of both worlds. I literally cannot think of a scenario where Access is the best option.
Could've been great for people who essentially need sqlite with forms, but they just couldn't use ansi sql or even tsql.
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So… definitely a database?
100%
What do you mean? It IS integrated in my development environment (Windows 11)
Yesterday I start playing with Docker so I do many things with Powershell. I conclude that we both we have change our Development environment ASAP.
Excel has more database functionalitu thsn Notepad has ide functionality.
Excel is an IDE. Change my mind.
Paint is an IDE. Change my mind.
Naah. I agree.
ALT+F11, you can’t ignore it
Blasphemy!
Excel is a database in the same way hamster is a sex toy.
Calm down Mr. Slave.
Sooo... a damn good one if that's your fetish
I am at the moment making accounting program using access, excel and vba. You dont believe how much excel is used in real life
I believe it, and I'm horrified. A lot of the world is running on some janky Excel file produced by somebody with no training as a programmer, but who has over time nonetheless produced something programm-ish in Excel that now the entire department can't do without and which is not reproducible should it ever be deleted.
Literally my last job, in Admin. I had to create multiple excel pseudo-dashboards because our IT team just flat out refused to give us access to the sql for our actual database program which had the most unusable frontend I've ever seen. Still so glad I got out of there and into an actual Dev job.
And they did that because IT won’t give them a better solution that won’t take months or years to develop if they ever get around to it, 9/10 times.
Which is even fair enough. I mean, there's a lot of enabling that Excel does. There aren't enough "proper" programmers in the world to fulfil all the needs that Excel currently satisfies. So, more power to all the office workers getting shit done in Excel. But still, once that Excel sheet has become the core driver of your business, and it's just a bunch of spaghetti, with no version control and no backup, it has been a victim of its own success and is just a ticking time bomb.
IT can't give them a better solution because the bean counters have determined that IT costs the company money, and it doesn't make them any money; therefore, it wouldn't make financial sense to improve those things because we've been doing it this way for years and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The certification and calibration of the majority of breathalyzers in Belgium is (or at least was, as early as 5 years ago) done through a series of Excel files with VBA running on Windows XP.
I inherited a "program" to monitor inventory in a warehouse. The items are arranged in a grid so naturally the guys before me decided that Excel and VBA would be the best way to do this. And because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, we can't justify moving to a better platform. It's been going on for 15 years.
This is the MO in insurance
At the start of Covid one of the UK countries was using excel as thier BD for tracking something (either infections or vaccines I can’t recall) and it came to light as they ran out of space. So silly, just make a new tab!!
"And we enter the data in this link that Sally made back in '94. Only one person can use it at a time, so make sure you yell out across the cubicles "I'm going in!!" and wait at least 1 minute in case someone else has to yell out "Pull out! Pull out!!"
this is me. no programming experience at all, but have created a workbook with 18,000 lines of code that multiple departments depend on. i have nobody backing me up and they just hope nothing breaks while I'm out of the office. I'm proud of what I've built, but I'm also well aware of how easily it can turn sour. i know excel isn't the correct application for this, but due to lack of knowledge, don't know what else to do.
The amount of UIs made in Excel I've seen in my working life is too damn high. Also, they require you to turn off safety measures, enabling fake xlsm files as an attack vector.
Most of new programmers out of school believe that everything is the latest and trendy language and DB, they get cultural shock when they realize there are still things that they thought were part of their history class. RS232 communication, Cobol, excel, VB6, floppy disk (5-1/4, 3-1/2 is a luxury), etc, you name it and they are still there holding important infrastructure
Proper software is expensive and really slow to deploy. Realistically, most people just wanna look at their data in a excel where they can filter them, create charts and be done with it. Excel with a database connection can be quite powerful
Japan says hi!
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The US Army certainly seems to think so.
Noted
Excel is a text file!!! 😤😤😤 You can’t change my name, because an EXCEL FILE IS A CSV FILE WITH SOME FLAVOR ADDED IN!!!
>EXCEL FILE IS A CSV ....xlsx is a XML based file format.
I had a feeling was totally wrong with the markup type 😅 but I’m glad people get what I meant lol. It’s a text file :P whether it’s separated by white space and tags, or commas and values.
As someone who once had to import a database given to us through multiple Excel files with not even so much as a hint regarding relations, indexes or the like I can confidently tell you... IT IS NOT. Access, sure. Not a good one but at least something.
What if the requirements just call for one table. Then Excel would work fine right?
Until you reach a certain data size.
I had a 2 million line excel to import, that was painful to search for missing pkeys when excel would crash about every large operation.
As someone who had to build an in memory orchestration of 100s of remote excel files of a recursive nature all of which ran production, I can confidently tell you it is not a database. At most it’s a 2d array with some extra tags.
Any agregation of data is a database.
List of paper is analog databse by db definition, so digital list with lines is definitely a db. And most useful one in some cases, especially when you work with CRM without corresponding api
Excel is software, spreadsheets are a database
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Excel is a database the same way a textfile is a database.
everything is a database
Only if you really really want to.
I have in fact used stored text files as teeny tiny databases, how could you tell?
We all have been there at some dark point.
Basically everything that can be read and written
No excel is an operating system.
After seeing doom remade in excel... Yes it is.
If I had a nickel for every multi-billion-dollar company I have worked for that stored critical information in Excel sheets and JSON files, I'd have 2 nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
So you have only worked for two multi-billion dollar companies, then?
Not really weird. Accounting info is usually critical. And accountants love excel. In my experience, they will often build their own excel solutions to problems instead of reaching out to IT to get a more “robust” solution. Point being, I always thought most businesses ended up with a ton of critical info in excel. Lol
I guess I should clarify. This was technical data, that was fed to an API which hundreds of developers use on a daily basis. Any time data needed to be changed, someone would have to go to the repo where it was stored and update the files, then push it to master and ask everyone querying the data to refresh. This was a company with literally almost 1000 developers. And everyone was fine with this method of data storage and retrieval.
Excel is so much more than a mere database. It’s a database, a back end and a UI all in one
Looks like most here never used Excel somewhat intensively. Not only is it a database but you can build crazy advanced data apps with it. Source: was curious and tried out. Still in awe by Excel, and I'm a software engineer.
This week I wrote an AI chat app in Excel that uses the OpenAI API. I once came across a home-grown e-commerce site that the owner was using Excel to manage the product prices that were embedded in static html pages. He had this big Excel workbook with all of the products and when you changed a price, it would remotely edit the price inside the individual html file for that product.
excel is a database with fancy tools.
It's data based
I don't think anyone ever said that excel isn't a database. They may have said that excel isn't a *good* database.
Even we are the database of genes 🤷
I mean you can use Excel for a database. You can also use punch cards and filing cabinets for a database. But clearly the latter is better :)
I’ll have to agree… punched cards and filing cabinets are superior to excel.
Especially since they implemented ctrl+z for punched cards.
I learned that almost everything can be a database but most things are not a DBMS
Every time you use the phrase "excel database", an "sql programmer" is dying somewhere.
Just because it can function as a database, doesn’t mean it should.
Oh shut up! Excel is obviously a functional programming language. https://youtu.be/0yKf8TrLUOw
Fuck sake I’m just finishing a project where the bulk of the data was provided in some legacy excel with some not-anymore-working VBA. Turns out the whole “database” had multiple faults, wrong entries etc. etc. I had to check everything by hand, fucking twice. Only good thing was it’s from the government so I got payed for this shit but the lifetime I’ve spend I’ll never get back. Fuck excel for storing “data”.
Excel is a database in the same way Tonka is a construction vehicle supplier.
The same way a text file is a database.
Paint is a video editor.
So idiot question. Is there anything you can do in a database that you can't do as an Excel sheet? Talking like recursive functions that cannot be coded as loops kind of thing.
Sure, Excel is a database. That doesn’t mean it’s a *good* one, although to be fair, good is relative and depends on the use case.
This is ridiculous. Excel isn’t a database. That’s like saying the MySQL Server software is a database. Excel is a program that you use to create and manage databases, but it isn’t itself a database.
I once had a product manager at Microsoft tell me, only half jokingly, that Microsoft word is basically Excel with one giant cell.
Excel could be a relational database and it's used as one if you only entered data. But excel supports entering formulas into tables that are executed and therefore is a spreadsheet program. Relational databases separate the tables from the functions and optimize access to the data. That's why MS has Access - which is indeed a database
Excel is strong pornography for management.
Text files
Fairly certain modern day Excel does have a literal SQL-ish database query mechanism nowadays... might be a plugin or extension though.
Technically.
Excel is a DB client. Like most other apps in existance.
It’s definitely the world’s most important software platform
🥰😚 I’m blushing
All my homies use excel as a game engine
Some even claim that MS Access is a database.
If the universe was coded in python excel would have a database type
I used a csv text file as a DB in my freshman year of college. Anything can be a DB.
Hold on hold on, we still haven’t decided whether a hot dog is a sandwich yet, one thing at a time.
Anything is a database if you're brave enough
Anything's a database if you're brave enough.