How would you put guardrails on the spreadsheets to make sure spreadsheets do not accidently damage the database performance through bad calls? In the hierarchy of skills, SQL is significantly less prevalent that spreadsheets.
Excel data is usually on a scale that DBs have no problem with, even doing full table scans. I am assuming this for something that starts life as a spreadsheet, not a database first where the sheet is initialized via a query.
Perhaps you could come up with a list of commonly-used functions and write optimized SQL functions for them, such that users start off learning with that API and gradually learn SQL when they're more comfortable.
