[Discuss] Frustration with SQL and Spreadsheets

[Rich Pieri]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:24:49 -0400
markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:

> I'm not sure I accept your example at all. If you add a column to a
> spreadsheet, you add that column to all the rows. The same as a
> database. What am I misunderstanding? if you shift a cell left or
> right you "break" the columnar relationship of the datum. Just as you
> would a sql database.

Take that address book example. You have columns A through E in the
spreadsheet, right? If you enter arbitrary data into a cell in column F
you are not adding a column to the sheet. You are entering data in a
column that already exists. This is what I meant by "infinite": you can
just keep entering arbitrary data into arbitrary cells forever (until
you run out of spreadsheet).

You can't do this with a SQL table because there is no column F or G or
H or.... You have to add the columns to the table first and then you
can add data to those columns in the record. Which turns out to be a
lot simpler than I thought.

Shifting cell data left/right will break columnar relationships but I'm
not sure you can do this with SQL records. Which is to say there
probably are ways to do it but I don't know what they are or what the
consequences will be.

An interesting question, I think, is storage efficiency. If you put 8
bytes into, say row 562, column ZZ, of a spreadsheet then your save
file will be about 7Kb according to the Untitled 1.ods I just created
from LibreOffice Calc, and most of that is XML metadata. How big would
a sqlite3 database file be if you did the same thing?

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