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Comment by langitbiru | Hacker News Reader

So the limit for Excell is 65,000 rows for the old format, and one million-plus rows for the new format (from the article).

Then I wonder, is there any tool that mimic Excell but with Sqlite as the backend? The limit of rows in Sqlite is 2 raised to the power of 64 (18446744073709551616 or about 1.8e+19).

https://sqlite.org/limits.html

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Mimicking a spreadsheet with an RDBMS would be a neat hack, but I think the better solution is to simply use the database like a database. If an amateur carpenter is trying to hammer screws into wood, you hand him a screw driver, not try to invent some sort of hammer with a twisting mechanism that turns screws when you wack them. Use the right tool for the job, and use it like it's meant to be used. If the workers involved don't understand the right tool, then either train them or hire new workers who do.

> not try to invent some sort of hammer with a twisting mechanism that turns screws when you wack them.

That's a thing, it's a manual impact driver. And sometimes it is the right tool for the job (for example, when you have stuck screws and a regular screwdriver would just strip the head).

Sure, kind of. You hit the impact driver with a hammer, but I wouldn't call the driver a hammer.

apparently part of the problem here was simply the fact that they used the columns [1] (of which there are far fewer, even on newer versions of excel) instead of the rows

[1] https://twitter.com/standupmaths/status/1313055411285774336?...

edit: retracting this as the person who posted that tweet made a correction in one of the replies

about 26^3 columns, or 17576

Something sort of like this already exists shipped with Excel in the form of Power Pivot, which stores data in an embedded database inside the Excel workbook, and is supposed to scale up to 2GB and hundreds of millions of rows.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/power-pivot-power...

As you might see from that link it's semi-integrated with the Excel interface, but the differences in the underlying model show through in some ways (like not being able to edit individual cells or use VBA)

You could open a DB as a table view in OO.org, so presumably you can in LibreOffice. I'm surprised Excel doesn't integrate with Sqlite DBs.

My naive view would expect tables <-> sheets; rows <-> tuples to be easy to do (for MS) and just don't touch the relational aspects??

Does it work with SQLite? Is it practical?

Microsoft actually has a reasonable migration path where you can use Excel backed by Access and then transition to Access backed by SQL Server. But you'd have to recognise that you had a problem first.

XLSX's limit is 2^20, or just over 1.04 million (as the article says).

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