D.5  Using Clusters to Work with Spreadsheets

Sheerpower clusters allow you to work with spreadsheets as if they are database tables. Clusters are very fast, processing millions of rows per second. Any column can be treated as a lookup key. Lookup speeds of over 10 million per second are typical.

The cities dataset is 10,000 rows of the largest cities in the world. It includes the city name, country code, and population for each one.

The cities spreadsheet is input into a program using the cluster input statement. You give the name of the spreadsheet CSV file, the number of headers, and the name of the cluster you will be using. In the example code below, you can input data into the a$ variable and then click run to try different cities.

Note: The CLUSTER INPUT statement has many options and can input JSON files, tab-separated-value (TSV) files, and even X12 files into clusters. For details see: Cluster Input