ExcelBanter - View Single Post - PLEASE READ IF YOU PROGRAM: Help Continue Visual Basic

Harlan Grove

wrote...
....
DATABASES DO ANALYSE DATA

They can sum & they can count. Why, they can even average!

Sarcasm aside, any software that can be automated and can string
together arithmetic operations can perform general numerical analysis.
It's not so much the operators and functions that distinguish databases
and spreadsheets, it's the data referencing. There are some tasks for
which RDMBS data structure is beneficial, but there are many
calculation tasks that require plain multidimensional arrays. Sometimes
the only relationship between the data elements in arrays is just index
order.

While databases do many things well, they don't do such things as
matrix arithmetic or optimization well. Those are tasks which require
iterative procedures on simple matrices or indexed arrays. There's a
considerable amount of statistical, engineering and econometric
analysis that involves matrix and array processing. Certainly RDBMS's
can provide the data storage facility, but you're clearly outside your
ken if you believe SQL queries can produce partial correlation
coefficients from stepwise regression.

Yes, there are add-on tools, many of which are proprietary, most of
which cost extra, and nearly all of which aren't found on average Excel
users' PCs. Besides, the choice of add-on product depends on what the
user prefers to use based on a number of different criteria, including
their familiarity with the add-on products available, but usually not
with much weight given to Aaron's Orthodoxy.

I CAN MAKE THE SAME NUMBERS YOU CAN. FASTER.

OK, I'll make this simple for you. Here's a table representing a 4x4
matrix. Show us, Oh Great Database Sage, the DBMS steps you'd take to
calculate its determinant and inverse. [Treat sequences of spaces and
underscores as field separators, but ignore the leading ones.]

Fld1__Fld2__Fld3__Fld4
-7__ -24___ -59___ 58
-78__ 65___ 56___ 22
59__ -60___ -31___ 47
35__ -21___ 10____ 1

Something tells me 99.999% of *rational* Access users would perform
this task by creating an Excel application instance and using its
WorksheetFunction.MInverse and WorksheetFunction.MDeterm to perform
these calculations, but I'm asking you to see how one irrational Access
user would do it.

are you challenging me?
....

Dunno about the other respondent, but I am. See the challenge above.
See my previous challenge to which you never responded (link below).
For a change of pace, quit talking out your backside and PUT UP OR SHUT
UP.

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...e=source&hl=en