Another year passes. I was hoping to write more articles instead of just these end-of-the-year screeds, but I almost died in the spring semester, and it sucked up my time. Nevertheless, I will go ...

ExcelTable is a pipelined table interface to read Excel files (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .xls, .xml), ODF spreadsheet files (.ods), and flat files (delimited or positional) as if they were external tables.

There are many ways to describe a database: the role it plays in a distributed architecture, the various internal components that make it work, and the various levels that define specific roles and ...