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Comment by batgaijin | Hacker News Reader

How much ram do you have? Not an excuse for their programmers though.

I always understood it to be a feature of Excel that it couldn't cope with larger datasets.

It means you are forced to consider buying an expense Enterprise SQL license once you are using it in earnest. If it wasn't for Excel chocking on 5million rows I'm convinced most businesses wouldn't bother with databases at all.

Well sure, if Excel did X then business wouldn't need another program to do X, and this is true for any value of X.

Your comment is a bit like saying "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals."

Excel was never designed to replace a database and the fact that it can't isn't some evil plot by MS.

>> "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals."

This part is tongue in cheek, but true. There are businesses out there, where excel is used for everything, including many things it should never be used for. Seriously powerful app. Seriously (ab)used.

I don't hate Excel, but I hate the "craplications" hare-brained power users create.

16 GB. That was enough to load it into RAM, it was a matter of the "right tool for the right job". MySQL handles large datasets easily, probably because it's not trying to display all the thousands of columns x millions of rows at once.

I've found the same to be true for editors. Most text editors have struggled to open large log files (500+ MB) whereas cat can open a file of basically any size.

I've had a similar experience with editors, good old vim and less works but most other editors will crash or become unusable as log sizes increase.

Of cause, for parsing logs a few well thought out awk commands combined with sed, sort, unique and other *nix utilities usually beats everything else in my experience.

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