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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

But could the hundreds of employees continue to make changes to the DB if it was moved out of sheets?

Actually there were only a handful of people updating it daily and it was my job to make all of those somehow give accurate results. The hundred of employees I was talking about were the ones making the sales, no direct access to those sheets, and their performance is going to be evaluated with the data that was recorded within those sheets. Data retrieval is so slow, a month of sales by 300 salesperson is around 30k rows, we have to connect that to their attendance, the day whether it is a weekday, weekend, holiday, rest day. The store they were assigned. The monthly quota they have, etc.

I lasted 3 months only, got tired of the sudden meetings discussing why can't we give fast and accurate results.

The point the person above was trying to make is that the reason you got "blank stares" was that you were proposing replacing a system where the users could read and write the data, to a system where they can't access it. Everyone saw this but you. Im sure AGI would've seen it too.

Also, the fact that you offered to do it for free makes me question your motivation. I think you were trying to make your own job easier at the cost of the users no longer having the thing that worked for them.

They were using the wrong tool for the job. The R in RDBMS for the existing sheets, they were using R as in not machines but humans doing the RELATIONAL work. Yes I was trying to make my job easier, that is why mankind invented RDBMS right? To make our work easier and accurate? No?

The user interface is usually more important than the backend. If the user interface for a spreadsheet is more powerful, then that can make it a better solution than a database that has a better backend but terrible UI.

It can be very difficult to replace spreadsheets because the UI has had 30+ years of iteration.

Can’t they though? Presumably there would be a form that validates inputs that they can use. Part of the problem that OP described is that they were writing directly to the “database” (and OP had to validate input afterwards).

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