My country's "track" and trace system.

... A fucking joke, especially when you consider the fact it uses Excel as the FUCKING Database!

Nothing wrong in using Excel though

@theabbie when 16000 people get lost, because some limitation of excel, it is wrong.

@stop If it hasn't broken yet, that means Excel is performing great

@theabbie have you read my comment? it is already broken.

@stop Ohkay, I thought you were giving a hypothetical example, If it's broken, then it will be fixed. Limitations will only be known after something breaks.

@theabbie Yeah, but not when you need to store stuff that would normally go in a DB. There are only so many things Excel is a good option for.
Also, Excel limitations are known to a wide set of people, clearly not our government and those who accepted in implementing the broken and overdue app.

@Berkmann18 Depends on the Data, Excel is not the only culprit, Bad implementation might be.

@theabbie If one uses Excel as a DB, it's already doomed to fail IMO.
There are many proper options to dynamically store data which are capable *and* appropriate for the app.

If it was used for manual data entry, then fine. But that's not how it works here, and no apps should be relying on Excel for something that plenty of actual DBs can provide.

@Berkmann18 How old is that implementation? Maybe DB didn't exist then, because implementing a DB would have been easier, why would they go with hard way.

@theabbie I don't have the exact date, but AFAIK, it's two months old at best.
And even the previous app (which visibly never saw the day) was made around April 2020.

@Berkmann18 All Good Devs are running after Big Companies, They can't afford good Devs, Maybe help them with that.

@theabbie They probably hired shit devs; I'll give you that.
But judging by what I hear from friends/acquaintances who work(ed) for the government in tech jobs (namely web dev), they (the government) are not one of the most reasonable people to work with and as a result software (and such) made for them tend to suffer one way or another.

I'm still very unsure about how they hit the excel limits with the number of cases they have since according to ms the limits are the sky.

@ilikeglue an old version? its contact tracing, so more people that the actual cases are in that table.