From Excel-Hell to cloud database heaven

by Jon Erik Solheim
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|Case study| Tutorials|

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A spreadsheet is a genious invention with many uses. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool. It's an awesome way to work with tabular data and to do calculations and visualize data.

Another very common use of spreadsheets is to store business data. "I created a spreadsheet with our customers and suppliers and uploaded it to Sharepoint". "I put the sales leads in a spreadsheet and shared it with you on Google Docs". These types of quick-fix spreadsheets slowly becomes permanent and starts to proliferate quickly, leading to a situation referred to as "Excel-Hell".

In many cases, the remedy for "Excel-Hell" is a database. In this article we provide an easy to follow walkthrough for transferring your spreadsheet "systems" into a modern cloud database.

The classic Northwind database converted to the NoSQL world

by Jon Erik Solheim
 - 
|Case study| Tutorials|

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This blog post uses the classical Northwind example from Microsoft to show how you can migrate from a traditional relational database to a NoSQL cloud database.

Northwind Traders Access database is a sample database that shipped with Microsoft Office suite. The Northwind database contains the sales data for a fictitious company called Northwind Traders, which imports and exports specialty foods from around the world. Developers (back in the 90's 🙌) used it to learn the MS Access product.

In the following example we will show how to:

  • Import the original SQL data files
  • Map relations between tables (collections)
  • Use the REST API to the new Northwind NoSQL database