Re:Look for the duct tape
by mirimir on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @05:07PM
(#16692727)
Well, there's local, as in your DC. And then there's local, as in your laptop.
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Still not unique to spreadsheet.
What do you have in mind?
That custom solutions do not inherently require a server - "either it's Excel or it doesn't run on the workstation" is something that's actually easier to disprove today, with containers and whatnot. Custom solutions can be fully local, i.e. no network access required.
OK, fair enough. And indeed, I use MySQL with MySQL Workbench in Ubuntu VMs. But still, Excel on equivalent Windows VMs pivots much faster.
Pivoting is a feature, not a solution; plus it might pivot well on tiny datasets, but for anything over 100k rows, it scales about as well as a brick.
It wasn't that I had too many lines, but too many columns. As I recall, a few hundred columns and maybe 50-100K lines. Even after increasing the field/column limit in MySQL, the query wouldn't complete. But in Excel on an equivalent VM, it computed in a few minutes.