I want to allow the user to operate on a table that might have as many as 400,000 rows, each of ~200 characters for a max total of 80MB of data.
As a first approximation, I’m thinking to give the user a .csv file somehow to paste into a spreadsheet.
First of all, does it even make practical sense to try such a thing? (For example, could a spreadsheet function — just one function — operating on all those rows complete in a reasonable time, like 10 seconds?)
If so, and given that MS Excel seems to impose a 64K row limit, what might be some of the techniques to give the user spreadsheet functionality on that giant table?
Excel 2003 has that limit. Excel 2010 allows more than a million rows.
Really, it makes more sense to use something more robust when dealing with that much data, like a database.