I just can’t seem to comprehend how Oracle can be so wealthy off of making a database when it’s theoretically easy for a company to store its own information.
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Excel is mostly designed for performing basic mathematical analyses on small amounts of data. And frankly it’s not really very good at that. People do use it for managing finances or performing statistical analyses, but there are lots of specialist software tools for those kinds of tasks that work better.
Database systems are mostly designed for securely storing and retrieving large quantities of data, and for ensuring that it remains consistent. Here are some things that are generally pretty easy with database software but difficult with Excel:
* ensuring that the database won’t be left in an inconsistent state if the system goes down while someone is in the middle of updating records
* retrieving or modifying all data that match certain, possibly complex, criteria
* restricting access so that certain types of data can only be seen by certain users
* logging access so that it’s possible to tell who has seen which pieces of data
* storing extremely large amounts of data (e.g. Excel is limited to about a million rows, a few thousand columns, and a few thousand characters in each cell)
* managing complicated hierarchical data structures, e.g. keeping track of which employees are in charge of which other employees, which buildings they are based in, etc.
Having said that, there are plenty of other options for database software besides Oracle, including numerous free and open-source database systems. Generally, the big advantages of picking a famous commercial application are that it is likely to be well supported and that it will be easy to find staff who are familiar with it.
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