[Discuss] Frustration with SQL and Spreadsheets

[derek at ihtfp.com (Derek Atkins)]

Rich,

On Wed, April 15, 2026 11:01 am, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:21:43 -0400
> markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
[snip]
>
> Here's a contrived example: an address book. You have columns labeled
> first name, last name, email address, phone number, street address. In
> the spreadsheet version you can add extra columns to a row for ZIP
> Code, an alternate email address or phone number, etc., without
> affecting any other rows. You can't do this in the SQL table version
> because the structure of each record (row) is fixed to first, last,
> email, phone, street. You would have to refactor your database schema
> to accommodate the new columns and rebase your data to fit the new
> record format so that every record in the table now includes the new
> columns.

If you're going to nitpick, you should at least make an argument that is
hard.  This is easily handled with:

ALTER TABLE address ADD COLUMN zip text;

Done.  You have a new column and all existing data is refactored.

The "work" here would be any API handling of data (e.g. JDBC) to add
knowledge of the new column and data type.  But I could imagine a generic
tool that would read the table definition and build the UI from that.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant