Google API, and our next conversation

Yep -- they did it again.


http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/


This is too cool.  I'm gonna play around with this before finishing that entry about screen-scrapes of the USGS website...


Meanwhile -- I've been thinking about ways of explaining to The Management reasons to use database over - say - spreadsheets.  To me the idea of data quality -- rules, enforcement, etc -- is self-evident.  But since we're in an industry where we bill by the hour - implying that the only incentive to Work Smarter is to be less expensive than the next guy - that isn't always evident.  Anyone have recommendations or thoughts on this?


And no, this isn't a witch-hunt for "non believers" of MS SQL -- this is merely questioning what we do.

• how many times do you need to be able to reuse a crosstab query, report, etc, to justify its creation?
• what size budget is necessary before implementing database instead of Excel tables?
• how many lab EDDs should you receive and copy/paste transpose before scripting entry into data tables?

Questions like those -- love to hear your thoughts.