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Comment by emailgregn | Hacker News Reader

I'm banging my head against Excel, wishing for SQL right now! But I could never go to my boss and ask for a purchase order for something called ThingieQuery. Give it a more bland gray name and make a massively expensive corporate site license available, and I think you're onto a winner.

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Author here. I'm inclined to agree, the naming is poor, it didn't start out as a serious product, and I never changed the name. That said, you can at least use the trial licence (free for 30 days) and after that who knows, maybe I'll rename the plugin to Excel SQL Studio 3000 XT and add an Enterprise Ultimate Premier License for 1200$.

Personally I think the guy is a moron. If he wasn't banging his head so hard he might realize it's reasonably priced and he can save all the corporate hassle by purchasing it himself.

You say that as if his company would just allow him to use software he purchased himself...

Enterprise doesn't work that way. There are a lot of situations where you aren't even allowed to use free-as-in-beer open source software due to security and/or other concerns, let alone software that you've paid for yourself. Besides, if the company is the one getting the benefit from the usage of the tool, why should he be the one paying for it?

The way where I work works (technically enterprise, a couple thousand full-time employees), if you want some software and think it's reasonably-priced, you can buy it and expense it. I've never heard of anyone getting in any trouble over this. You can also submit a helpdesk ticket to have purchasing buy something for you, which is what we'd do for e.g. Subscription licenses which require someone entering a corporate card and keeping track of it.

Haha - you have clearly never worked for a 'real' company :)

ExSQLence.com

completely agree about the name - would love to use this at the office.

at $50 i just go to my boss and say "Hey Boss, can i get the company card to buy a $50 product so I can do the xyz task easier?" almost always he'll say "$50, yeah whatever"

+1 on the name...

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