Posts by Doctor Syntax 42421 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I'm not sure a database is the right application for just passing tabular data around. If this were someone complaining about importing straight text files into Word and getting unwanted auto-corrections you wouldn't tell them to use a desktop publishing application instead would you? You'd tell them to use Notepad. Here's the problem - there isn't the equivalent tell-it-like-it-is equivalent of Notepad for tabular data.
"It's not the tool. It's the choice of tool."
I agree it's the choice of tool. But the correct choice of tool isn't something more complex than a spreadsheet, it's something simpler. The standard PC, whatever the OS, doesn't have it. If it were text you'd have the choice of your word processor or Notepad/Kedit/whatever. For tabular data such as CSV you have a choice of spreadsheet or.
Are they?
Not necessarily. They just want a quick and dirty way of viewing and exchanging tabular text data. Excel is a case of "if you have a hammer...". An RDBMS would make that a sledgehammer. What's needed is something simpler, not something more complex. And I say that as a biologist who changed to become an RDBMS specialist mid-career.
"And excel is a stupid program for any data analysis that is more complex than basic bookkeeping... Ok, that's three problems."
I'm sure there's a much larger set of suitable problems than that. However there are other problems for which it isn't suitable and for which a similarly accessible application doesn't exist.
Some-time biologist who moved into databases here. That's databases as a complete career change. You can keep your emacs but vi is hardwired to the fingers.
Nevertheless a database might not be the right solution here. As soon as you start talking about tabular data and databases in the same breath you start thinking about RDBMS but the time taken to set that up for what might be a one-off is probably not worth it. There's almost certainly a need for a simple way to tabulate data without making too many assumptions about the nature of the data. It's a principle I've observed many times; the more assumptions you make in the design of an application the less capable it becomes.
In this case take on the data as text columns which is probably the most minimal assumption you can make. If you want to flag the column* as date - or anything else - that's the time to let the application reformat the text. If you want to use a database to store the data you can, of course, have the application generate the schema at this point.
* Spot the implied assumption here.
Files get passed around. If you rely on setting the program that opens them to something non-default you come up against the problem of relying on everyone to do that correctly every time otherwise munged files start getting circulated. It's a bit like you rely on everyone to use mv or rm -r correctly in root. Of course nobody ever got the latter wrong did they?
I suppose it's just possible that the lobby was easy to break into but the doors into the rest of the bank were a bit tougher. I suppose it's also possible that the only thing removable from the lobby was the sanitizer. I've come across a few criminals dumb enough for that but not dumb enough to choose sanitizer if cash were available.
A frequent variant of this is trying to communicate with a company whose online "Contact us" is a very limited number of FAQs with no message link, an online chat service which is currently or invariably offline and phone. On phoning before even dropping the customers into an ACD system as limited as the FAQs, they're played a long recording to the effect that they could get in touch via the website.
I'm beginning to think that you must have stopped reading the article before you got to this paragraph:
McBride also stated that Hermes had a better availability record than either Gmail or Exchange Online, with a "single two-hour outage" in recent years. He also said that the cost of Hermes, estimated at around £10 per user per year including staff costs, compared favourably to the cost of the EES licence, which he said was £35.00 per year excluding staff costs (but including additional services).
I did contract in the UK prior to retirement. I knew of umbrella companies. I avoided them. I let an accountant do most of the stuff for a fee, CoSec or I did the rest. Increasingly after IR35 came in I managed without agencies as well.
One of the major attractions of freelancing was the degree of control I had. You see the work and costs of running the company as the price of that, I see them as the means.
"This is a problem over and above the abilities (or lack thereof) of the staff."
If the manglement sees moving its data centre to the cloud or the like as a means of saving money on staff who have the ability to secure their infrastructure, wherever taht may be, and can demand commensurate salaries, then the two are intertwined.
