Voice of the DBA

Tag: Excel

  • Excel in the Clouds

    Excel Forever!

    I think that no matter what happens with Windows, SQL Server, and many other Microsoft products, Excel will be with us forever. It seems as though this quote is true: “Excel is a leading tool for data analysis today” (From Excel to the Cloud). Almost everyone that works with data uses Excel, including business users, and even Powerpivot didn’t bother to try and build a better interface. It’s built on Excel as an add-in.

    Microsoft Research has built a new way for Excel to interact with data sets in the cloud, with an add-in that brings various analysis algorithms to data using cloud computing. It’s built more for research and development, and not necessarily business, but it’s an interesting idea. I know that there are often scale issues with analysis systems, and computing resources can be expensive to maintain full time.

    The cloud , however, brings a more flexible way to scale up computing resources for specific problems. If you are involved in the analysis of large amount of data, this could be a great way to provision resources for people that need to analyze very large amounts of data. I don’t know how the economics would work for large transfers of data, but the scalability of buying CPU power only when you need it can be very attractive.

    The interface choice of Excel is another concession that it’s just the best way to look at data. It also is very familiar to most computer users, and removes the need to construct any type of application for users. I know that most of the time that I want to analyze lots of data, I drop it into Excel because it’s easier to manipulate and play what-if games; it’s certainly easier than using T-SQL aggregates.

    It also means that Excel is likely going to be with us forever. Between Windows and OSX, it’s got to be one of the most used applications in the world.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Low End

    Are products like Access and VB bad? A long time ago it seemed that if you could spell VB, you could get a job. That was good in some ways as it helped the explosion of growth in technology employment. It was bad because we had many people building applications without understanding software development and we ended up with many buggy, crash-prone applications.

    Someone posted recently  that these “low-end” products had helped them get a job and get started in this business. This person thought my comment was a complaint against these software products, but that’s not the case. I know quite a few people have built or supported applications on Access, VB, or Excel and then gone on to a career with SQL Server. In fact, the first business application I built was on Lotus 1-2-3, using a large combination of macros to help someone with estimating.

    Are “easy-to-use” products like Access or Excel good for business? Should they be used to build applications? Like most things in technology, the answer is “it depends.” Often these are not the basis for a robust system on which you run your business, but they can be. Often there is a need  or desire for something to be built quickly, and cheaply, in order to accommodate some aspect of business. These tools are a way for some type of automation to be assembled quickly and used by business people.

    However you can outgrow these applications and find that something stronger is needed. That’s the time when an IT project makes sense, and arguably, that’s the appropriate time to spend the money.

    I like prototyping useful tools, and Microsoft provides ways to easily accomplish this.  To me, software like Powerpivot seems likely to spur on more projects, not fewer.

    Steve Jones