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Mostly a large collection of data is stored in a relational database. Relational databases have the advantage that they are offering a high level of perfomance especially for a large number of data records and especially when having aggregated queries. SQL is the most common computer language to communicate and control a relational database management system (RDMS). It offers various possibilites to fetch data (e.g. a JOIN tables within one query in order to receive aggregated data from different tables in one result set). Furthermore it allows to make certain limitations (e.g. WHERE-statement and HAVING statement) as well as to group data (GROUP BY) and sorting. Microsoft Excel is a well known spreadsheet software which offers a lot of powerful functions for data preparation and evaluation. Excel allows you to visualize data (e.g. Pivot table or various kind of charts) and it offers a lot of formulars for calculation, aggregation and reporting. As mentioned at the beginning, data is mostly stored in databases for performance reasons but also due to the fact that a database represents a centralized storage possibility for data which can be accessed by everyone (according to the access policy of course). Webshops, ERP Systems, CMS systems, just to name but a few, are all using relational databases in most cases. MySQL is a very popular and often used RDMS but it offers not that powerful possibilites of data evaluation and reporting than Excel. So why do not user the actual data from MySQL (as the most reliable datasource), fetch them by using SQL (because of its powerful possibilities of JOINING) and process the final result set in Excel