It seems every month when I'm diluged by lots of data I fall back on ole
reliable, Excel. But, I get over 50,000 rows of data to scrub. A colleague
of mine suggested I use a database. Seems simple so far, but having dabbled
in Access, it has always not so intuitive to understand. My question is
two-fold, is SQL a database. I believe its the language of some other
database. If I'm corrent on the later, what database(s) use SQL?

Tony

Tony,

There's a lot of ground to cover with that one simple question SQL
is an abbreviation for Structured Query Language, and it's a language
that is used primarily to retrieve and manipulate data that is stored
in a database system.

There are as many dialects of SQL as there are databases; Access uses
Jet-SQL, SQL Server and Sybase both use Transact-SQL, Oracle has
PL/SQL, and so on. Most databases adhere to a form of generic SQL know
as ANSI-SQL, but there adherance varies.

You may want to start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL

HTH,
Stu

ajocius wrote:
> It seems every month when I'm diluged by lots of data I fall back on ole
> reliable, Excel. But, I get over 50,000 rows of data to scrub. A colleague
> of mine suggested I use a database. Seems simple so far, but having dabbled
> in Access, it has always not so intuitive to understand. My question is
> two-fold, is SQL a database. I believe its the language of some other
> database. If I'm corrent on the later, what database(s) use SQL?
>
> Tony