Ruby on Rails - 数据库或excel

Question

I am currently doing a project in Ruby on Rails and I have been presented with a dilemma.

The dilemma is that the users of my system will be uploading an excel spreadsheet. The issue is should I just read straight from this excel spreadsheet into my front-end or should I load this spreadsheet into my MySQL database and then to my front-end.

I have asked numerous people about this issue and have researched on-line to no avail.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

The Excel file is not a database. If you need to allow it as source input, parse it, copy the data into a real database and connect to it.

The database is more flexible and efficient for querying and processing information.

Answer 2

I can think of two benefits, or rather options, of having them upload the excel spreadsheet for processing by your back end.

1) would be for your tracking purposes (who sent what and here is what the back-end did with it...). In fact consider that other formats/versions could be introduced, would it be important to keep them to identify what went wrong? "How can we handle this new format"?

2) On the other side, the front-end way that is, you offload processing from the back-end, but that means that the browser app could get fairly complex and depending on your excel, that is if it has many relationships, sending that data up to the server could be complex. However if is simply a flat spreadsheet, say simple rows without totals/tax calc/..., then it might be an advantage of loading it into the browser and then sending these rows up to the server if offloading processing is of any importance.

However point 2 really is diluted by point 1, which to me would be of greater importance for future migration of this service. So I personally would choose uploading it and processing on the back end.

Update

As you clarified in the comments, if you are asking about the use of Excel on the backend as a database? I would agree with Simone Carletti's answer here. Maybe just add a real database gives you much more flexibility, more tools and, more performance. This difference is loading a file, parsing it into some structure, then saving it (unless you are using some .NET framework and even if, the Database (MySQL, MongoDB...) would give you much more flexibility in structuring and querying, over the headache of managing with the speed of DB connections. You might just want to write a sample in both to evaluate, the DB solution will probably win you over.