Benchmarking Spreadsheet Systems (original) (raw)
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Spreadsheet software is the tool of choice for ad-hoc tabular data management, manipulation, querying, and visualization with adoption by billions of users. However, spreadsheets are not scalable, unlike database systems. We develop DATASPREAD, a system that holistically unifies databases and spreadsheets with a goal to work with massive spreadsheets: DATASPREAD retains all of the advantages of spreadsheets, including ease of use, ad-hoc analysis and visualization capabilities, and a schema-free nature, while also adding the scalability and collaboration abilities of traditional relational databases. We design DATASPREAD with a spreadsheet front-end and a regular relational database back-end. To integrate spreadsheets and databases, in this paper, we develop a storage and indexing engine for spreadsheet data. We first formalize and study the problem of representing and manipulating spreadsheet data within a relational database. We demonstrate that identifying the optimal representat...
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2018 IEEE 34th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2018
Spreadsheet software is the tool of choice for interactive ad-hoc data management, with adoption by billions of users. However, spreadsheets are not scalable, unlike database systems. On the other hand, database systems, while highly scalable, do not support interactivity as a first-class primitive. We are developing DATASPREAD, to holistically integrate spreadsheets as a frontend interface with databases as a back-end datastore, providing scalability to spreadsheets, and interactivity to databases, an integration we term presentational data management (PDM). In this paper, we make the first step towards this vision: developing a storage engine for PDM, studying how to flexibly represent spreadsheet data within a database and how to support and maintain access by position. We first conduct an extensive survey of spreadsheet use to motivate our functional requirements for a storage engine for PDM. We develop a natural set of mechanisms for flexibly representing spreadsheet data and demonstrate that identifying the optimal representation is NP-HARD; however, we develop an efficient approach to identify the optimal representation from an important and intuitive subclass of representations. We extend our mechanisms with positional access mechanisms that don't suffer from cascading update issues, leading to constant time access and modification performance. We evaluate these representations on a workload of typical spreadsheets and spreadsheet operations, providing up to 50% reduction in storage, and up to 50% reduction in formula evaluation time.
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Spreadsheet as a relational database engine
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Spreadsheets are among the most commonly used applications for data management and analysis. Perhaps they are even among the most widely used computer applications of all kinds. However, the spreadsheet paradigm of computation still lacks sufficient analysis.
Abacus: A New Spreadsheet Paradigm for Reducing Errors
When spreadsheets were initially developed, computers had low-resolution screens which could hold very little information and display only text-based information. Today, although nearly every computer has a large, high-resolution color graphical display, we are stuck with the paradigm of spreadsheets as a huge array of cells in which formulas are copied and modified. Formulas cannot be seen except for a cell-at-a-time view. Cells are referred to with an arcane letter-and-number syntax that belies the relative nature of the relationship between cell names and their use. This paper explores several ideas to form a new paradigm for spreadsheets for the purpose of making them easier to use correctly.
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In this paper, we report some on-going focused research, but are further keen to set it in the context of a proposed bigger picture, as follows. There is a certain depressing pattern about the attitude of industry to spreadsheet error research and a certain pattern about conferences highlighting these issues. Is it not high time to move on from measuring spreadsheet errors to developing an armoury of disciplines and controls? In short, we propose the need to rigorously lay the foundations of a spreadsheet engineering discipline. Clearly, multiple research teams would be required to tackle such a big task. This suggests the need for both national and international collaborative research, since any given group can only address a small segment of the whole. There are already a small number of examples of such on-going international collaborative research. Having established the need for a directed research effort, the rest of the paper then attempts to act as an exemplar in demonstrati...
Google Sheets v Microsoft Excel: A Comparison of the Behaviour and Performance of Spreadsheet Users
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Summary of Findings Spreadsheet technology has traditionally been limited to a single user operating in a desktop environment and working in an isolated environment. With the advent of Cloud Computing, a paradigm shift has occurred in the way users utilise the collaborative sharing and communication of their work in both an educational and business environment. The opportunities for people to cooperate on multiple spreadsheets at the same time and in real time have grown significantly. However, the behaviour and performance of users working in this new paradigm has not been explored to a great extent in scientific. In comparison to desktop spreadsheet technologies such as Excel, Cloud based spreadsheet technologies have only started to be investigated in relation to user behaviour and performance.