Excel is a nice job-creation measure for freelancers.
Re-implementing such sheet in C# was a full time job for several years for me.
Modern development tools (in contrast to C or Assembler) help the user to maintain its sanity by preventing him from hurting himself. You need much less of unspoken practices to develop in Java then in C. And you will hurt yourself much later.
The same goes for databases. You need much less foresight when you write SQL, but the optimizer will be overwhelmed sooner or later, if you are doing something complex.
I would say that CubeWeaver prevents the user from shooting himself in the foot for much longer than Excel.
I don't think you can address the downsides without completely redesigning Excel.
There were some attempts to add loops, IFs and so on to the assembly language. Somehow this approach could not compete with Java: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language#Support_for_...
CubeWeaver is a .NET web application. It is available as a SaaS product and as a downloadable Desktop Edition (based on electron.js). Check out the download page: https://cubeweaver.com/download
Just watched the video. I think it is a different approach. The spreadsheets in the video seem row-oriented. It goes more in the direction of a relational database. CubeWeaver is multidimensional, so you don't need a group by function. You can group by a dimension just by creating a new worksheet with less dimensions and copying the data from the original worksheet using a formula. You can also group by an attribute using the JOIN function.
The masterdata is stored as JSON to avoid creating/dropping columns and tables as list/columns are added and removed. But an option to have a fully normalized relational structure in an on-premise installation is on my feature list. It could be useful for enterprise clients who could use the data directly for reports and other applications.
If you choose the on-premise options no data will ever leave your company. Administrators will install the software on a server inside your company and will be responsible for updates, backups and security of the server.
I don't think AirTable is a competitor in any way. As far as it is something like Sharepoint. I think the logo was created before AirTable was there at all.
Thank you. It is an Angular 9 SPA frontend with a .NET Core backend and an SQL database (MySQL or SQLITE) as a data store. I use several open source libraries. Handsontable is used to display the grid for example. A complete list is available in the help->about dialog.
I would suggest to test the cloud version with some dummy data first, so that you know that the application is ok for you. On premise version is also available, but not for free. You will also need either some Linux know how or my support to install, maintain and keep your installation updated.
I don't think a multidimensional spreadsheet (like Lotus Improv) makes sense for a single user. Multidimensionality introduces a lot of complexity and it is only justified by very complex models. Apart from some special cases this complexity is only there when at least 5-10 people are entering the data. Web application is much easier to rollout in a corporate environment. And I don't see any drawbacks. I don't have MS Office for example and use only Google Sheet for a long time already.
Egeria was just a technology demonstrator. CubeWeaver is a cloud application which can scale over multiple servers, supports user authentication, model sharing and redundant data storage. I also added a lot of features that the pilot users were missing (like data import, csv import, aggregation, various formatting options, etc...).
Selecting rows from cache of a database is still 100-1000 times slower than reading numbers from an array. And dumping this array into a KV store is much easier than generating SQL.
I've got several mails from people who'd like to install the system on their own machines. Installing Egeria is not as easy as a desktop application because it is a web server. I will probably add a download page with installation instructions in the next weeks.
I was surprised that there is no common file standard for interchanging dimensional data. As far is I can see netCDF and Zarr only store values/arrays and not the metadata? I will check if there is an easy way to import one of them.
Most of these products are so expensive, that only large companies can afford them. A middle size company has a guy who gets 30-50 Excel reports per e-mail at the end of a month and combines them to a single document manually. I hope Egeria could help in such situations...
Cells are grouped into chunks (similar to Minecraft) and stored in binary form. There is a complex algorithm which decides how the data is partitioned. All the operations are done in memory and the KV store is only used as data storage.
Egeria is in-memory for performance reasons. Egeria can recompute millions cells per second. To do so cells are grouped into chunks and stored in binary form. Relational databases are much slower. It is possible to have a relational backend sometime in the future, but for now using a key value store also meant less implementation effort.
At the moment I don't. It's a beta test. The commercial version will support two factor authentication. I think a local installation on the client's server/workstation would be the best option for very sensitive data.
A single view should not get too large. The system will not show more than 60000 cells in one view. You will get an error message. The cube itself can grow very large: 10-100 million filled cells. The trick is to design the dimensions so, that only a small portion of the data is visible at once. You can group large dimensions by a column to build a hierarchy (category/model/sku or region/point of sale). This way only a portion of the data is shown at once.
That's exactly what I try to understand now. I think that people who work with OLAP now should be able to use the system. But I also hope that some percentage of non database people would also be able to learn it. I don't think that the system is self explanatory, but watching a 10 minutes tutorial video could explain a lot.
From what I have heard of it: yes. I hope the formula language is also a bit better. AFAIK Improv could only have one formula per dimension element. Egeria allows formulas on any subspace inside the cube.