Hiran de Silva
This explainer is inspired by an ongoing debate with Christopher T Fennell on LinkedIn, who portrays Power Query as a database to replace a relational database such as Access or SQL Server.
Let’s talk about plates and kitchens.
Imagine you’ve got a plate in your hand. You can do two things with it:
- You can bring your own food from home, plonk it on the plate, and eat it.
- Or, you can take that plate to a restaurant, order a meal, and have the kitchen serve it up nicely onto your plate.
Now here’s the important bit: the food on your plate is not the kitchen.
Yes, the plate is holding food. Yes, the food came from the kitchen. And yes, it looks organised and ready to eat. But the plate does not suddenly turn into a kitchen just because it now has food on it. Suggesting otherwise is like pointing at your Sunday roast and declaring, “Look! I’ve got a Michelin-star kitchen right here on my plate.”
That’s hilarious—and completely wrong.
The kitchen is where all the ingredients live. It’s where chefs combine, process, and prepare food according to what customers order. The plate, meanwhile, is just a serving surface: convenient, practical, but temporary. Once you’ve eaten, it’s empty again.
Now, let’s map this back to spreadsheets and databases.
- The kitchen = the database. That’s where the raw data (ingredients) is stored, organised, and kept safe.
- The counter or ordering system = the interface you use to ask the kitchen for what you want (SQL queries, database connections).
- The plate = Power Query (or the data model inside Excel). It’s a temporary place to hold the food once it’s been delivered from the kitchen. You can combine dishes, slice them up, garnish them—but you’re still working with what’s been served, not with the kitchen itself.
To make the picture even fuller: in business, you don’t just consume the data. Often, you also contribute something back to the kitchen. Think of journal entries, accruals, or reconciliations—these are like sending extra ingredients back to the kitchen so the next round of meals can be prepared correctly.
So when someone says, “Power Query is a database because it has tables and relationships,” that’s like saying, “This lasagna on my plate is a restaurant because, well, it has food.”
It’s a funny mistake, but it misses the point. A plate is for serving and eating. A kitchen is for storing, managing, and preparing. The same goes for Power Query and databases.
The bottom line: Power Query is not a kitchen. It’s just a plate. Useful? Yes. Powerful? Absolutely. But a plate nonetheless.
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