So they both store data in a table like structure, but that’s about where the similarities end. Excel is useful for handling smaller more flexible data sets, but has performance, scalibility, storage, and structural deficiencies compared to SQL, it’s also harder for computer languages to communicate with a shared excel dataset and modify it vs SQL.

One of the major issues with excel as a database is data limits, excel only allows for ~1 million rows. Considering there are ~1 billion possible SSNs, excel would not be a great medium for them for that reason alone.

One big advantage of SQL is you need to structure your data on the creation of the table and it’s designed with the expectation that all data will fit a structure, including unique keys, format, and other limits and structures. This allows you to enforce database rules easily and massively reduce storage size and query times.

There are a bunch of other reasons for using SQL but most of it boils down to either it’s faster, easier for multiple computers to access and read/modify simultaneously, or better for enforcing rules and structures when modifying it.

What changed? I thought that is still what they did.

Just checked the app on my phone, 0 bites used, I don’t really think they get any live data from it.

I was digging around on the steam hardware survey and it does list steam deck separately if you tell the hardware survey to only show you Linux, and it is ~5.5x more popular that arch, and also reports that arch and Ubuntu are similar, leading me to believe the steam deck is fully excluded from the default combined view.

If you take that x5.5 and use it to extrapolate, steam decks should have about 0.82% market share