Business Modelling Using SQL Spreadsheets

One of the critical deficiencies of SQL is the lack of support for array and spreadsheet like calculations which are frequent in OLAP and Business Modeling applications. Applications relying on SQL have to emulate these calculations using joins, UNION operations, Window Functions and complex CASE expressions. The designated place in SQL for algebraic calculations is the SELECT clause, which is extremely limiting and forces applications to generate queries with nested views, subqueries and complex joins. This distributes Business Modeling computations across many query blocks, making applications coded in SQL hard to develop. The limitations of RDBMS have been filled by spreadsheets and specialized MOLAP engines which are good at formulas for mathematical modeling but lack the formalism of the relational model, are difficult to manage, and exhibit scalability problems. This demo presents a scalable, mathematically rigorous, and performant SQL extensions for Relational Business Modeling, called the SQL Spreadsheet. We present examples of typical Business Modeling computations with SQL spreadsheet and compare them with the ones using standard SQL showing performance advantages and ease of programming for the former. We will show a scalability example where data is processed in parallel and will present a new class of query optimizations applicable to SQL spreadsheet.