http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660@Mike Minutillo, you do have Raven LightSwitch, it's called Embedded mode :)http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment8http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment8Fri, 09 Nov 2012 14:55:06 GMTThis is a great story. Especially when you've been out there a while and you know just how many enterprises ARE held together with ridiculously massive and cobbled together Excel Spreadsheets and Access Databases. Now if only we had some kind of Raven LightSwitch...http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment7http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment7Fri, 09 Nov 2012 04:23:22 GMTI appreciate the comments above. It really was a stop gap measure - literally do or die. I'd already had some experience with RavenDb, but am still learning every day. In large part, thanks to the incredible support from the people on Google.Groups I was able to bash the app out in two days. When I originally wrote to Oren, it was as much to thank him for Raven as for anything else - the actual db part took about two hours - three weeks on I'm still messing around with the pages and javascript etc, but as I said the actual move from Excel to Raven, with all the indexes etc, data access was only about two hours. Now that it's become an "app" and is no longer a spreadsheet, I have the luxury of being able to improve it - the flexibility that Raven offers allows me to do that whenever I want. The biggest fear I had was modelling the data against live data - my starting point were the columns in the spread sheet. If this would have been SQL I would have no doubt locked myself into fixed data types, migrations etc - Raven let me change the types, add and delete properties on the fly etc. The thing is that the spreadsheet/app is responsible for the management of literally millions of dollars - even though we knew at the time when we started the business, that it would grow in time, we had no idea that it would grow so fast - the real issue lay with the fact that I foolishly and lazily decided to put all the data into a spread sheet in the first place. The app is very nearly finished now - it's anything but beautiful ( and I would be ashamed to show my code to anyone ), but it does its job (and pretty much saved us from bancruptcy) - which I guess is all I could really ask of it. Regards Jeremy http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment6http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment6Thu, 08 Nov 2012 23:38:53 GMTYes but what about relational integrity(TM)? /sarcasm @Rafal: they can always partition this later.http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment5http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment5Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:54:46 GMTYeah, a spectacular amount of $$ makes everything else pale. And I envy the guy that despite his basic programming skills he was able to provide so much value for his company - this is so much different from many amazingly architected applications that didn't earn a single dollar for their creators.http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment4http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment4Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:40:19 GMT@Rafal, maybe, but success of this story is concept to deployment in 3-4 days. Finding 1000s of dollars without any effort and the ease of migrations. The solution described was not suppose to be a cure all, just a way to better manage the data. And you figure the developer didn't know the first thing about MVC or RavenDB when he started. I say that is a huge win.http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment3http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment3Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:17:39 GMTThis so depressing...http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment2http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment2Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:13:02 GMTI wonder what will they do if they add a second document to the database. Hopefully nobody will put data in the wrong document... But seriously, I'm not sure if replacing columns and rows with a single document isn't going to work against them soon. http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment1http://ayende.com/159649/ravendb-customers-stories#comment1Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:46:07 GMT