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Comment by O__________O | Hacker News Reader

Nothing you’ve described sounds like a valid reason to move “a couple of spreadsheets” to a database system which might require: budget planning, database administrator, system design, server, colocation, query optimization, report system, monitoring, user interface, backup/recovery plan, authentication system, change management logs, user training, business process analysis, etc.

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The two planks of wood across the canyon work fine, there's no valid reason to build a bridge! That would require planning, architects, engineers, safety inspections, construction, etc. Let's just keep ferrying cars across the wood planks, we all know how wood planks work, and we've got plenty of duct tape for when they break!

This is a deeply flawed analogy. Hosted cloud spreadsheet has effectively perfect availability and durability compared to most database solutions, and never requires maintenance, and costs nothing.

Google Sheets, the product, may have excellent reliability, but business processes that rely on spreadsheets certainly do not. The point in my analogy was not that the planks of wood were bad products, it's that they were being misused by ignorant people.

Use wood planks as a temporary crossing, don't ferry cars over them. Run your bake sale with spreadsheets, don't run a multimillion business with them.

I don't need to link you to the resources on the astronomical number of problems that are caused by spreadsheet-oriented business processes and shadow IT. Using spreadsheets instead of proper systems shifts the operational burden onto humans, who certainly do not have perfect availability and durability.

> but business processes that rely on spreadsheets certainly do not

I wonder if this migration from spreadsheets to databases is what helps ossify business culture in older companies. With spreadsheets, change and iteration are easy with fast cycles. With a database, change is a pain and iteration cycles are very long since everything has to though multiple stages of review, approval, and implementation.

That's why your standard IT guy loves databases and hates democratized software like Sheets. You can run a 80% of business in a spreadsheet but IT Guy doesn't want to be disintermediated.

No, as an actual IT guy myself, our job is to support and improve business technical operations. Most of us want _less_ work. If we wanted to be intermediaries, we'd be middle managers.

I don't know how much time you've spent supporting spreadsheet users, but I work with them daily and I see first-hand the amount of energy being wasted. Stuff that takes them all day, they could do in a single SQL query. Probably wouldn't take them more than a day to learn how.

It's not about democracy, it's about doing things in a sensible way. I'd be happy if they used another "democratic" tool like Microsoft PowerBI and a fully-managed database.

You're just gatekeeping. You have tautologically defined "sensible" to be the same as your personal preferences.

Eh, maybe. I'll hazard that my preferences for business technical operations are more informed than those of my users. I seek only to help them.

Side note, I'm quite surprised that somebody in this form is so staunchly in favor of spreadsheets.

Interesting idea. I'd say probably yes, to some extent. Bringing back the human element, I'd say the businesses still stuck on spreadsheets are much less open to change than those who are willing to adopt database technology.

While long review cycles for schema changes are annoying, I find it more worrying that most businesses have zero review process at all for spreadsheets.

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