Simple data analysis: 2x swiss pocket knife is sometimes ok
Although I am bit of a "nosql" believer (Cassandra, Voldemort and Amazon S3 kick a55!); and get easily frustrated with non-intuitive behavior of Excel, I admit there are real uses for spreadsheets and relational databases. And not just ones that developers often associate with them (plus there are lots of anti-patterns: do NOT stuff those config files in DB, please). But tasks like, say, Ad hoc chicken-wire-n-bubble-gum low-budget quick-n-dirty data analysis are something where combination of the two makes whole lots of sense.
So I was glad to see this blog post showing how to do that with H2 and a spreadsheet (note: you don't really need Excel -- OpenOffice (OOo) Calc is almost as good in many cases). H2 project itself seems interesting -- quite healthy amount of discussion on dev mailing lists, seemingly reasonable progress. So I may just write something about that in future as well.
