Spreadsheet analysis and design
Communications of the ACM
Architectural issues in spreadsheet languages
Proceedings of the international conference on Programming languages and system architectures
Database System Implementation
Database System Implementation
ICDE '98 Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Data Engineering
Spreadsheets in RDBMS for OLAP
Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Finding High-Level Structures in Spreadsheet Programs
WCRE '02 Proceedings of the Ninth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'02)
A user-centred approach to functions in Excel
ICFP '03 Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Forms/3: A first-order visual language to explore the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm
Journal of Functional Programming
VLDB '05 Proceedings of the 31st international conference on Very large data bases
PrediCalc: a logical spreadsheet management system
VLDB '05 Proceedings of the 31st international conference on Very large data bases
Type inference for spreadsheets
Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming
Spreadsheet functional programming
Journal of Functional Programming
Business modeling using SQL spreadsheets
VLDB '03 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Very large data bases - Volume 29
A Spreadsheet Algebra for a Direct Data Manipulation Query Interface
ICDE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
Spreadsheet-based complex data transformation
Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
Automatic web spreadsheet data extraction
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Search Over the Web
Senbazuru: a prototype spreadsheet database management system
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
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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. In this paper we demonstrate that a spreadsheet can play the role of a relational database engine, without any use of macros or built-in programming languages, merely by utilizing spreadsheet formulas. We achieve that by implementing all operators of relational algebra by means of spreadsheet functions. Given a definition of a database in SQL, it is therefore possible to construct a spreadsheet workbook with empty worksheets for data tables and worksheets filled with formulas for queries. From then on, when the user enters, alters or deletes data in the data worksheets, the formulas in query worksheets automatically compute the actual results of the queries. Thus, the spreadsheet serves as data storage and executes SQL queries, and therefore acts as a relational database engine. The paper is based on Microsoft Excel (TM), but our constructions work in other spreadsheet systems, too. We present a number of performance tests conducted in the beta version of Excel 2010. Their conclusion is that the performance is sufficient for a desktop database with a couple thousand rows.