In all honesty, I feel like proper database solutions are just not as accessible to laypeople as they'd need to be. It's easy to create a table in Excel, enter arbitrary values and share it. It's also not particularly hard to create a second table and add some simple formula for a lookup. More complicated logic can be learned as you go.

By comparison, something like, say, Access needs more effort and understanding of data structures. You can eyeball a spreadsheet and just enter values without worrying about types, data integrity or anything. Never mind setting up actual database servers.

Yes, obviously those "proper" definitions would be more reliable, but particularly when the use cases aren't entirely clear from the outset and new ones keep getting tacked on to an existing solution, it's just more convenient in the moment to use a fairly low-effort solution until the whole thing becomes a clusterfuck of "low-effort" solutions.

It becomes a matter of platform gravity: By now, so many people are used to Excel and so much infrastructure is built around it that even a new, better and more laypeople-friendly data handling tool would have a hard time getting a foot in that door.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable with most computing tasks, not particularly great with basic spreadsheets, but unless there's some kind of usable frontend to reliably manage a database, I mostly see databases as:

"A magic box that holds tons of cryptic information, would be tedious to open, risky to edit, risky to backup or migrate or update, and could corrupt at any moment."

Maybe I should put more effort into learning DBs besides initializing them in a Docker compose and praying, but for human readable information that's meant to be shared, I think you're bang on the money when it comes to why spreadsheets are still so popular!

[–] my_hat_stinks@programming.dev 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

As someone who interacts with databases regularly... Yeah, that sounds about right.

I was recently working with another team's feature to handle data retrieval for the end user, pretty front end but it was far too tightly coupled with db management concepts. How is a non-technical person supposed to know the difference between an inner join and a left join?

Not too long ago I suggested using cross apply to a senior dev I work with and they admitted they weren't sure what that does or how to use it. People who don't regularly work with databases have no chance.

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