I Just Told a Guy NOT To Use a Database
Jeff Smith
Product Manager | Databases | Blogger | Software Development | Cloud | Social | Community Management | Product Marketing
I'm a database guy. I work for the world's #1 database vendor. Heck, we even have the world's #1 free database to boot.
So imagine my surprise when I heard these words come out of my mouth this morning:
Keep using your Excel worksheet until it doesn't do what you need it to do anymore. Then maybe give a database a go.
My friend is a PhD engineering student. He's getting paid to do research...something to do with concrete and roads and bridges or stuff. Anyways, he's got a 500MB Excel file.
Between sets at the gym he looked at me and said, 'hey, you are a database guy, right? Should I use one?'
His biggest problem was that it was taking too long to open his file in Excel. So after telling him to just leave it open all the time, and then telling him to switch out his hard drive for a SSD and double his RAM - I got around to a few of the nice things he'd get out of working with a database.
But at the end of the day, if I were him, I'd just keep using Excel until I couldn't anymore. And then when I couldn't, I'd probably pick up a MySQL tutorial.
He seemed confused. I told him I'm a database guy, I'm always going to say 'yes, use a database.' And I honestly believe he'd be better off in the end. But the end may be 4 years away, and right now he just needs to run some VBScript and Excel formulas.
I seem to be rambling a bit here. I think what my scatterbrain is trying to say, is that my friend will be much more motivated to give the database thing a go when he really needs it - not now when it's just his gym rat buddy telling him he should really be doing it just because.
On a side note, my wife is also an Engineer (the REAL kind she keeps reminding me), and I've more than once helped her with her SQL Server databases that her infrastructure modeling programs use. So eventually I think my buddy really will want to learn how to muck around with SQL and databases.
Educator, Writer and Practitioner in Database Software and Information Security
8 年Jeff, I respect your candor and your willingness to consider your friend's actual needs rather than your work interest. However, your friend is already using a database. It's got high usability, but crappy integrity and consistency. The question is not why you're recommending a spreadsheet "instead of a database," the question is why Excel is the most usable and widely-used relational-like database.
Seeing that your friend is already probably using Excel to get exactly what he wants - presumably a quick and easy way to filter with a pretty intuitive UI, and aggregate data a dozen ways from Tuesday using PivotTables ... why should he need to invest in a database right now anyway? You made the perfect recommendation, in my book. And as @Robin commented, "right tool - right job." I often feel like I'm channeling my long dead father who used to bark at me "Dammit, use the right tool for the right job!" so many times I thought my first name was Dammit until I turned seven. BTW, here's an example of "right tool, right job" from 1995 - a commercial for my favorite multi-tool, Dremel, that does /almost/ everything I need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgKLhzArQTI
Supervisor | Programmer | Web, PHP, LAMP, Oracle, PL/SQL, Swift
8 年Sounds like he needs a database to me. :-)
Administration Assistant at Kraft Heinz Watties
8 年Great post. It takes a hammer sales person with integrity to admit that not all problems are nails.
Sr. Principal Advisor, Streaming Data Technologies
8 年Right tool, right job. And for some jobs, Excel is a great tool…