I have a large excel worksheet that I want to add to my database.
Can I generate an SQL insert script from this excel worksheet?
asked May 29, 2013 at 16:04
2
I think importing using one of the methods mentioned is ideal if it truly is a large file, but you can use Excel to create insert statements:
="INSERT INTO table_name VALUES('"&A1&"','"&B1&"','"&C1&"')"
In MS SQL you can use:
SET NOCOUNT ON
To forego showing all the ‘1 row affected’ comments. And if you are doing a lot of rows and it errors out, put a GO between statements every once in a while
answered May 29, 2013 at 16:45
Hart COHart CO
33.8k5 gold badges46 silver badges62 bronze badges
10
You can create an appropriate table through management studio interface and insert data into the table like it’s shown below. It may take some time depending on the amount of data, but it is very handy.
answered May 29, 2013 at 16:54
Andrey MorozovAndrey Morozov
7,7505 gold badges52 silver badges75 bronze badges
8
There is a handy tool which saves a lot of time at
http://tools.perceptus.ca/text-wiz.php?ops=7
You just have to feed in the table name, field names and the data — tab separated and hit Go!
Bhargav Rao
49.1k28 gold badges124 silver badges139 bronze badges
answered Aug 27, 2014 at 8:09
mhnmhn
2,6404 gold badges30 silver badges50 bronze badges
1
You can use the following excel statement:
="INSERT INTO table_name(`"&$A$1&"`,`"&$B$1&"`,`"&$C$1&"`, `"&$D$1&"`) VALUES('"&SUBSTITUTE(A2, "'", "'")&"','"&SUBSTITUTE(B2, "'", "'")&"','"&SUBSTITUTE(C2, "'", "'")&"', "&D2&");"
This improves upon Hart CO’s answer as it takes into account column names and gets rid of compile errors due to quotes in the column. The final column is an example of a numeric value column, without quotes.
Dharman♦
29.9k22 gold badges82 silver badges132 bronze badges
answered Jul 7, 2017 at 10:23
Simon BaarsSimon Baars
1,82721 silver badges37 bronze badges
0
answered May 29, 2013 at 16:06
2
Use the ConvertFrom-ExcelToSQLInsert
from the ImportExcel in the PowerShell Gallery
NAME
ConvertFrom-ExcelToSQLInsert
SYNTAX
ConvertFrom-ExcelToSQLInsert [-TableName] <Object> [-Path] <Object>
[[-WorkSheetname] <Object>] [[-HeaderRow] <int>]
[[-Header] <string[]>] [-NoHeader] [-DataOnly] [<CommonParameters>]
PARAMETERS
-DataOnly
-Header <string[]>
-HeaderRow <int>
-NoHeader
-Path <Object>
-TableName <Object>
-WorkSheetname <Object>
<CommonParameters>
This cmdlet supports the common parameters: Verbose, Debug,
ErrorAction, ErrorVariable, WarningAction, WarningVariable,
OutBuffer, PipelineVariable, and OutVariable. For more information, see
about_CommonParameters (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=113216).
ALIASES
None
REMARKS
None
EXAMPLE
ConvertFrom-ExcelToSQLInsert MyTable .testSQLGen.xlsx
philu
7631 gold badge8 silver badges17 bronze badges
answered Mar 23, 2018 at 11:07
SteveCSteveC
15.4k23 gold badges99 silver badges173 bronze badges
0
You could use VB to write something that will output to a file row by row adding in the appropriate sql statements around your data. I have done this before.
answered May 29, 2013 at 16:26
JoshJosh
4146 silver badges14 bronze badges
Here is another tool that works very well…
http://www.convertcsv.com/csv-to-sql.htm
It can take tab separated values and generate an INSERT script. Just copy and paste and in the options under step 2 check the box «First row is column names»
Then scroll down and under step 3, enter your table name in the box «Schema.Table or View Name:»
Pay attention to the delete and create table check boxes as well, and make sure you examine the generated script before running it.
This is the quickest and most reliable way I’ve found.
answered Jun 22, 2016 at 19:41
Steven MaysSteven Mays
3651 silver badge12 bronze badges
You can use the below C# Method to generate the insert scripts using Excel sheet just you need import OfficeOpenXml Package from NuGet Package Manager before executing the method.
public string GenerateSQLInsertScripts() {
var outputQuery = new StringBuilder();
var tableName = "Your Table Name";
if (file != null)
{
var filePath = @"D:FileName.xsls";
using (OfficeOpenXml.ExcelPackage xlPackage = new OfficeOpenXml.ExcelPackage(new FileInfo(filePath)))
{
var myWorksheet = xlPackage.Workbook.Worksheets.First(); //select the first sheet here
var totalRows = myWorksheet.Dimension.End.Row;
var totalColumns = myWorksheet.Dimension.End.Column;
var columns = new StringBuilder(); //this is your columns
var columnRows = myWorksheet.Cells[1, 1, 1, totalColumns].Select(c => c.Value == null ? string.Empty : c.Value.ToString());
columns.Append("INSERT INTO["+ tableName +"] (");
foreach (var colrow in columnRows)
{
columns.Append("[");
columns.Append(colrow);
columns.Append("]");
columns.Append(",");
}
columns.Length--;
columns.Append(") VALUES (");
for (int rowNum = 2; rowNum <= totalRows; rowNum++) //selet starting row here
{
var dataRows = myWorksheet.Cells[rowNum, 1, rowNum, totalColumns].Select(c => c.Value == null ? string.Empty : c.Value.ToString());
var finalQuery = new StringBuilder();
finalQuery.Append(columns);
foreach (var dataRow in dataRows)
{
finalQuery.Append("'");
finalQuery.Append(dataRow);
finalQuery.Append("'");
finalQuery.Append(",");
}
finalQuery.Length--;
finalQuery.Append(");");
outputQuery.Append(finalQuery);
}
}
}
return outputQuery.ToString();}
answered May 25, 2018 at 11:24
Here is a link to an Online automator to convert CSV files to SQL Insert Into statements:
CSV-to-SQL
answered Sep 16, 2016 at 4:49
This query i have generated for inserting the Excel file data into database
In this id and price are numeric values and date field as well. This query summarized all the type which I require It may useful to you as well
="insert into product (product_id,name,date,price) values("&A1&",'" &B1& "','" &C1& "'," &D1& ");"
Id Name Date price
7 Product 7 2017-01-05 15:28:37 200
8 Product 8 2017-01-05 15:28:37 40
9 Product 9 2017-01-05 15:32:31 500
10 Product 10 2017-01-05 15:32:31 30
11 Product 11 2017-01-05 15:32:31 99
12 Product 12 2017-01-05 15:32:31 25
answered Jan 10, 2017 at 6:38
I had to make SQL scripts often and add them to source control and send them to DBA.
I used this ExcelIntoSQL App from windows store https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NH0W51XXQRM
It creates complete script with «CREATE TABLE» and INSERTS.
answered May 9, 2017 at 13:40
I have a reliable way to generate SQL inserts batly,and you can modify partial parameters in processing.It helps me a lot in my work, for example, copy one hundreds data to database with incompatible structure and fields count.
IntellIJ DataGrip , the powerful tool i use.
DG can batly receive data from WPS office or MS Excel by column or line.
after copying, DG can export data as SQL inserts.
answered May 31, 2019 at 7:43
Often when you are working on 2 incompatible systems and try to import data from one to another, excel can be a handy tool. I have used excel plenty of times to generate SQL insert / update statements which I could later execute on the database console. Here is a tutorial if you ever have to use excel to generate SQL statements.
The example below shows a simple insert statement generated from customer data in a table. But you can easily extend this technique to come up with complex query statements.
1. Have your data ready
For our purpose the data is arranged like this:
As you can see, the data has to be in a tabular format so that you can easily generate the query statements. Often you may have to use lookup formulas to clean up the raw data imported in CSV formats.
2. Using excel operator ‘&’ to generate SQL query
Once the data is ready it is very easy to generate the SQL queries using excel string addition operator – &. For the above tabular structure, the concatenate formula would look like:
="insert into customers values('" &B3 &"','" & C3 & "','"&D3&"');"
where B3, C3, D3 refer to above table data.
The final queries will look like:
There are a few practical ways to improve this:
- Cleaning up data using countif(), sumif(), if() formulas
- Using vlookup() or countif() to cross-reference items on one table to another
Share this tip with your colleagues
Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips
Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.
Learn & be awesome.
-
40 Comments -
Ask a question or say something… -
Tagged under
development, howto, Learn Excel, Microsoft Excel Formulas, programming, software, sql, technology, text processing
-
Category:
Learn Excel, technology
Welcome to Chandoo.org
Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.
Read my story • FREE Excel tips book
Excel School made me great at work.
5/5
From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.
Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.
Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It’s all here.
Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.
Related Tips
40 Responses to “SQL Queries from Excel”
-
Leonid says:
I use this method very often.
I always use =SUBSTITUTE (ColumnWithText,»‘»,»»»)
to be sure that potential apostrophe in text columns are doubled as required in SQL.-
Ankit says:
Awesome ! I don’t use excel very often so the substitute thing is gold to me 🙂 thanks !
-
-
@Leonid.. that is a good technique to use substitute to clean up text apostrophes. thanks
-
Goal:
Generate update statement in excel where the columns that can be updated are dynamic
You want the columns which are not updated to keep the same value
(or not be overwritten with NULL values with the new generated statement)
the statement can be applied to multiple rows in excel for the same column headers
(This is why the ‘$’ exist for the column headers that are being set)A1 = First_Name
B1 = Last_Name
C1 = Middle_Name=»
UPDATE PERSONS «&CHAR(10)&
» SET 1 = 1 «&CHAR(10)&
IF(LEN(TRIM($A2))=0,»»,», «&$A$1&» = ‘»&$A2&»‘»&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($B2))=0,»»,», «&$B$1&» = ‘»&$B2&»‘»&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($C2))=0,»»,», «&$C$1&» = ‘»&$C2&»‘»&CHAR(10))&
» WHERE name = ‘staticordynamicvalue’ AND gender = ‘staticordynamicvalue’
«
Output (if all columns are set):
UPDATE PERSONS SET 1 = 1,
First_Name = ‘Joe’,
Last_Name = ‘ORien’,
Middle_Name = ‘Richard’
WHERE age = 28 AND gender = ‘m’Output (if only First _Name (A1) is set):
UPDATE PERSONS SET 1 = 1,
First_Name = ‘Joe’
WHERE age = 28 AND gender = ‘m’ -
Possibly my post above is confusing without the actual table to look at. I will do the same example with the table used here. Instead of an insert statement I will generate an update statement for the columns, Cust_Name, Phone & E-mail
where we can generate an update statement for any column individually or together. 🙂 I hope this can help.
=”
UPDATE table “&CHAR(10)&
” SET 1 = 1 “&CHAR(10)&
IF(LEN(TRIM($A2))=0,”»,”,Cust_Name = ‘”&$B3&”‘”&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($B2))=0,”»,”, Phone = ‘”&$C3&”‘”&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($C2))=0,”»,”, E-mail = ‘”&$D3&”‘”&CHAR(10))&
” WHERE Cust_Name = ’Bill Gates’
” -
Thanks, it has been very useful !
It saved me at least 30 minutes, and time is the most expensive thing in our world… -
Kad says:
Hey Paul,
What if any of A2, B2, or C2 is a date field?
The formula above is taking date as string. Any solution?-
Smitha says:
Even I faced the same problem. If any of the above columns are date, it is taken as string. Any work around for this?
-
-
I’ve found the string concatenation method works well.
At the risk of sounding spammy I would mention that
if it’s something your are doing regularly it might be worth investigating a tools
that make it easier, such as QueryCell, an excel add-in I’ve developed.It gives you a right click menu option that will produce and then customize insert statements for the selected region of Excel data.
Cheers
Sam-
Hi,
For inserting the excel data to your SQL table, you can create insert statements in excel file according to your columns.
then just execute the statements all at once, it will insert the required data to sql server table.
thanks,-
Ajay Koli says:
How…?
-
-
-
Chetan Patil says:
I tried to generate t-sql insert queries from the above example
=»insert into values(‘» &A2 &»‘,'» & B2& «‘);»
but it generates on one record instead of all records from excel sheet.
I’m using Excel 2003 and the excel sheet contains 922 records. -
Most data bases can generate DDL for any object but not a lot of them allow generation of INSERT statements for the table data.
The workaround is to make use of ETL Tools for transferring data across servers. However, there exists a need to generate INSERT statements from the tables for porting data.
Simplest example is when small or large amount of data needs to be taken out on a removable storage media and copied to a remote location, INSERT..VALUES statements come handy.There is a number of scripts available to perform this data transformation task. The problem with those scripts that all of them database specific and they do not work with textiles
Advanced ETL processor can generate Insert scripts from any data source including text files
http://www.dbsoftlab.com/generating-insert-statements.html -
B.N.Prabhu says:
Super Aiticle. Thanks for this post.
-
Archana says:
Hi ,
i need a sql query to update a DB in excel 2010..
i have the query(SQL) for insert in excel as ,
=»insert into customers values(‘» &B3 &»‘,'» & C3 & «‘,'»&D3&»‘);»similarly i need q sql query for update in excel
-
i want clear formulas only for insert,delete,update,select
-
Ankit Mahendru says:
Hi !
I would like to thank you so much ! This trick saves me a lot of time. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it !
-Ankit -
You may like to take advantage of this unique tool ‘Excel to Database’.
(free for 60 days)http://leansoftware.net The Excel-to-Database utility enables you to validate and transfer data from Microsoft Excel or text file to a database table or stored procedure process. Any text data can be pasted into the application, this may be from another Excel sheet or from text files such as CSV format. SQL Server, Access, MySQL, FoxPro .. Application features Some unique features of Excel to Database include: ?Easy to use color coded/traffic light data validation ?Data is validated as soon it is typed or pasted into Excel ?Upload Excel data to a table or stored procedure process ?Allow default values ?Mandatory/must have fields can be specified ?Allow user friendly column names ?Allow excel formula / calculated fields ?Multiple database type support: Microsoft SQL Server, Access, MySQL and others (to be tested) ?Supports Custom SQL scripts, with SQL/Excel merge fields ?Database validation checks ensure you comply with any rules defined within the database ?Multiple Task configuration ?For co-operative use, Tasks can be shared across a network ?Task configuration is password protected http://leansoftware.net -
Manoraj says:
Its works fine for single record.
I want to update 1000 records in DB. Can you help me. -
Excel database tasks 2.3 (EDT)
you can now load directly from any source into Excel, validate and upload to most SQL database platforms including SQL Server with automatic transaction wrapping.
You can also use EDT as a multi-user application by easily designing your own Edit data tasks and deploying EDT on your users workstations.
Automatically creates UPDATE/INSERT statements based on the primary key. Default SQL can be modified as you require.
Makes the best use if Excel power — formatting, formula, validation, conditional formatting.. without creating any problematic spreadsheets!
Release details on the blog:
http://leansoftware.net/forum/en-us/blog.aspx
Thanks for the interest
Richard -
Usman says:
Thanks for the valueable information, it really help me alot.
Thanks again. -
Laercio says:
As I do with a field of type date?
= «UPDATE SET business datetime =» & «‘» & A2 & «‘ WHERE ID =» & B2 & «»
the date is not 03/10/2012 is 41246. Even putting quotes … -
Elaein says:
Please show how to do it properly with dates as well as when those dates are empty. Thanks!
-
mahesh.S says:
In a separate column make the date to Text using below formula
=TEXT(C2,»mm/dd/yyyy») Then Refer this text column in your update statement -
cjb says:
Great post saved me a a load of time on a task i had to complete
-
sql010 says:
thanks for sharing article… helpful!
-
Pooja says:
Thanks 🙂
-
[…] Excel formula used – http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/09/22/sql-insert-update-statements-from-csv-files/ […]
-
HSoomro says:
If any one can help me out with following.
I want to know a SQL query of below excel formula:
=LOOKUP(0,-SEARCH(LEFT(F2,LEN($B$2:$B$100))+0,$B$2:$B$100),$A$2:$A$100)Excel data is as below;
Name Codes
names1 992
names2 57
names3 856
names4 297
names5 63if there is a number (29756789) then it should search in sql by taking the prefix of number (297) from (29756789) and return the name field (name4).
Codes can be of two digit or three.Thanks
-
Victor R Udeshi says:
=»INSERT INTO table VALUES (» &A3 &»,'» & B3 & «‘,'»&C3&»‘,'» & D3 & «‘,'» & E3 & «‘,» & F3 & «,» & G3 & «,» & H3 & «,'» & I3 & «‘,» & J3 & «);»
B3 has date data that looks like 9/22/17 but with the formula above b3 is coming out as 43000?
how do i fix that?
-
Mr.Shan says:
I just want to insert the Excel records in Sql table without Visiting SQL.
basically i m just want to run a command in Excel Only.
Help Me..plz..? -
Danyal Hussain says:
Hi I have a question maybe you guys have an answer for me
=»insert into customers values(‘» &B3 &»‘,'» & C3 & «‘,'»&D3&»‘);» where B3, C3, D3 refer to above table data.
the above technique works but is there a way to write it so it takes a range instead of individual columns. because I have an extremely wide table
=»insert into customers values(B3:D3);» where B3, C3, D3 refer to above table data.
-
Qadir Bux says:
Awsome
-
Bhagwat says:
Its Great Effort to help everyone who working with excel.
-
Ed says:
Thanks for the mini-tutorial on SQL from Excel. Didi it several years ago, but couldn’t remember the syntax! All the dialogue was really helpful as well!
Leave a Reply
Problem:
I am working on a project where I need to populate some configuration settings from an Excel file to the SQL server database so that on considering the values only my package will run. Here I want some easy method to populate those Excel data to my SQL server database. So that there will be no need to write Insert statements daily for each record. I want this task to be automated.
Solution:
Excel files includes a very good functionality called Macro execution. And the good thing is that we can write our own macro in VB and then we can execute it inside the Excel file. Here I too did the same thing, written one macro that will create INSERT statements for the current activated sheet.
To write Macro in Excel 2007:
- Navigate to View tab in Excel
- In View ribbon click on Macros Button
- In the Macro Dialog box, give a valid name for a macro you want to create, and press Create button
- In the code window, enter the script given below:
The code is self descriptive; in this I am fetching all the columns for the given active sheet at first. Then it will fetch the values for the corresponding columns. It will ask you for the range of data to be fetched like the starting Row no and the maximum Row no.
Testing:
Let’s take the example of a small table named Student and the data for this is:
Name | Roll | Marks |
Ram | 101 | 89 |
Ashok | 102 | 93 |
Kumar | 103 | 78 |
In excel sheet it will look like this:
Here the starting row no is 2 and maximum row no is 4.
So after giving the inputs to the script, it will generate the below code:
values( ‘Ram’, ‘101’, ’89’);
insert into [Student] ( [Name] , [Roll] , [Marks] )
values( ‘Ashok’, ‘102’, ’93’);
insert into [Student] ( [Name] , [Roll] , [Marks] )
values( ‘Kumar’, ‘103’, ’78’);
Conclusion:
Creating a macro to generate Insert statements from the excel file is very handy and easy than importing data from excel to SQL server or by package creation. The code can be further customized to generate insert statements for all the sheets given in an excel file.
Prerequisites
- Python
- Pandas
- Click
|
|
Step to create a SQL insert generator using python
- Create data in excel file, we’ll create an example data
Sheet name : M_ACCOUNT
ID | FULLNAME | ADDRESS | IDENTITY_NUMBER | IDENTITY_TYPE | COUNTRY |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | John Doe | Yogyakarta | 34754354986 | KTP | Indonesia |
2 | Maverick | Jakarta | 43589743545 | KTP | Indonesia |
3 | Al Sah-Him | Semarang | 58479846645 | KTP | Indonesia |
Sheet name : M_USER
ID | USERNAME | PASSWORD | M_ACCOUNT_ID |
---|---|---|---|
1 | johndoe | $2y$12$tRgbrmjdyytEyv8ceakIc.7vUCjLfpEi6K/Ube0hB5X4c7vPcMMQC | 1 |
2 | maverick | $2y$12$tRgbrmjdyytEyv8ceakIc.7vUCjLfpEi6K/Ube0hB5X4c7vPcMMQC | 2 |
3 | alsahhim | $2y$12$tRgbrmjdyytEyv8ceakIc.7vUCjLfpEi6K/Ube0hB5X4c7vPcMMQC | 3 |
- Create python file call
sql_generator.py
|
|
This file will create command sql_generator.py --generate filename.xlsx --outputdir dir
Type sql_generator.py --help
to show help command
- Generator will be create a sql file according sheet name
File M_ACCOUNT.sql
|
|
File M_USER.sql
|
|
Thankyou
codeburst.io — Building Beautiful Command Line Interfaces with Python
$ click_ — Commands and Groups
This script will generate insert sql accroding to the config and data in the excel file
INSERT TB_USER (USER_ID, NAME, AGE, EMAIL, ADDRESS, SCORE, BIRTHDAY, DATA_ID )
SELECT 'golden_three_fat', '金三胖', 28, 'rzh0001@qq.com', 'Nanjing', 12.1, '19900416', fn_get_data_id FROM DUAL;
INSERT TB_USER (USER_ID, NAME, AGE, EMAIL, ADDRESS, SCORE, BIRTHDAY )
VALUES ('golden_three_fat', '金三胖', 28, 'rzh0001@qq.com', 'Nanjing', 12.1, '19900416' );