Or people forcing SQL when CGI endpoints executing bat files querying Excel documents on a network drive is fine.

Somehow cheap hacks is frowned apon but if you use stupidly complex systems then, ye, you have to be competent and doing best practice or something. Just spread the mess out over multiple layers of abstraction and no-one will realize it is bad ...

> Or people forcing SQL when CGI endpoints executing bat files querying Excel documents on a network drive is fine.

I'm not sure if you are trolling or not, but I can imagine that some power plants around the world do it :)

Heh ye well I am exaggerating alot.

My point is KISS in the amount of knowledge required to do something, not just the implementation complexity.

E.g. on my last job we were really machine engineers doing some c programming. Good luck establishing fancy pancy workflows. Instead of trying to use relative paths and setup env variables for dependencies we just all had the same version controlled folder on c:\ with everything in it. And it is fine.

Querying Excel files doesn't sound easy, though. SQL is not that hard. Though easiest would probably be a Ruby-on-Rails-like framework that just sets up your basic CRUD-stuff for you.

Sure. It was meant as an exaggerated joke, but I mean the point (with a bad example). You would probably need to write some VBA to query the excel doc, which is not easier then using SQL.