Database is a specialized software for storing and managing large amounts of data. It uses efficient data structures (such as B-tree, hash, etc.) and query optimization algorithms (such as indexing, partitioning, etc.), can quickly deal with large amounts of data read and write operations. In addition, the database can also perform transaction management to ensure data consistency, integrity and persistence, while being able to support multi-user concurrent access to ensure data security.
While Excel is a spreadsheet software, although it can be used for simple data storage and processing, but not for large amounts of data processing. Because Excel saves all data in a file, so when the amount of data exceeds a certain threshold, the file will become particularly large, resulting in the opening and operation of the file will be very slow, lagging and other issues. In addition, Excel's support for complex data structures is relatively limited, can not well deal with multi-table correlation, multi-dimensional summarization and other operations, the lack of powerful query and data analysis capabilities.
In summary, databases and Excel use different data structures and processing strategies, resulting in them in the processing of large amounts of data showed great differences.