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Month: June 2022

Excel vs. The Data Lake (So I Launched a Startup Pt. 14)

It seems I always start my posts with “it’s been a while since I last posted…”. Well, it has. The truth is that during the month of April, I did something I hadn’t done in a while: took a vacation. That was nice, but then I got COVID (not fun), which everyone in my household got. Then I went to Singapore. More on that later. I’ve also been very heads down with some coding and technical stuff relating to security on our startup. I’ll tell you all about that in part 15. Anyway… I wanted to share a long overdue update.

A week ago, I posted a LinkedIn poll where I asked the question: “How many of you use Excel or GoogleSheets as a database?” In my extremely unscientific poll, about 45% of the responses said that they did. Indeed, this poll mirrors my experience in talking with customers in that despite massive corporate investments in platforms like Snowflake, Splunk, data lakes, delta lakes, lake houses, tons of work is done in Excel. The result is that for many organizations, a significant amount of their most valuable data isn’t in their data lake.

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