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I'd contest your points 2 and 3 from a business application perspective. Relational DB's resemble ledgers from a business perspective. Most business apps and n
by matt_s 5y ago
I'd contest your points 2 and 3 from a business application perspective.
Relational DB's resemble ledgers from a business perspective. Most business apps and nearly all financial apps think in terms of ledgers of transactions. Go one to two degrees of separation from a financial transaction in any web app these days and the users of that system will want to line up other activity/transactions in the app with the financial ledger. Then they want to ask questions and have reports on things like: how many users for that customer? how many purchases this month for that customer? what did they purchase? etc.
I think its historical and historical also implies the vast majority of systems aren't likely to change if there is some-other-tech that may be easier to work with. Its a safer decision to pick well known tech because you'll know the trade-offs, support issues, hiring parameters, etc. from the history of all that came before you. To reverse that point - picking some esoteric language/db solution increases the risk of a product/project failing, not because of the technology but all the other factors that surround that technology.
- OJFord 5y agoYep and just look at all the people using Excel. They're not saying 'oh if only this was a diagramming tool where I could draw lots of lines between boxes instead'.
- merrywhether 5y agoLots of people struggle to use Excel at all beyond simple non-relational lists. And even then they do tons of raw copying and manual work to generate the data they need. I would not say that Excel’s prevalence is somehow a sign that tables are natural to people.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoI think Excel's prevalence is a sign that tables are natural to people (to the degree we can say a data structure of any kind is natural, but, well) -- the struggles come in, I think, from - trying to use it with data where tables are a poor fit, or - trying to use it with data that can't be reasonably represented in more than two or three tables I still use spreadsheets for simple "databases," but I can't think offhand of any time I've a spreadsheet that requires more than two interlinked tables/sheets.