Good morning! I've found TONS of articles, questions, and guides on how to import data from local excel documents to Azure SQL databases, or how to pull from an Azure database to Excel, but nothing about how I could use SQL to query an excel online document (which would be hosted on SharePoint).
I'm fairly new in my learning - I'd be setting this up via a query in SQL written/executed via Azure Data Studio. The excel file is one that I'd be creating, and hosting via our company's SharePoint system. The Azure SQL database will also be one that I'm constructing myself, which is in progress. I've tried to find walkthroughs, scripts, explanations, something. But it's totally silent. Granted, that could be an indicator that it can't be done, but I figured I'd ask here. Overall, I'm just trying to figure out what is possible, so I can come up with a decent range of simple, easy-to-use means of data input for my team, or, in this case, to capture some of the ways they're tracking their work.
Not sure if this is sufficient detail, please feel free to ask any follow-up questions.
Azure Data Studio is a tool to work with SQL databases, most notably MS SQL. Though you can connect to some other types as well.
Therefore, in order to use Data Studio to query your data, it needs to be in a SQL database. To accomplish that, you need to setup a process to load the data from your Excel document into a table in you database and run that process on a regular basis to update the table. You could look into Azure Data Factory to do that, though I don't see why you should bother to do that just to use Azure Data Studio, when you can browse the data in Excel, use PowerBI, Qlik or any other tool that can connect directly to Excel.
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The way we use data is either retrieving survey data from other organizations, or creating survey instruments ourselves and soliciting organizations under our organization for data.
We have a database where our largest table is perhaps 10 million records. We extract and upload most of our data on an annual basis, with occasionally needing to ETL over large numbers of tables from organizations such as the Census, American Community Survey, etc. Our database is all on Azure and currently the way that I get databases from Census flat files/.csv files is by re-saving them as Excel and using the Excel import wizard.
All of the 'T' in ETL is happening within programmed procedures within my staging database before moving those tables (using Visual Studio) to our reporting database.
Is there a more sophisticated technology I should be using, and if so, what is it? All of my education in this matter comes from perusing Google and watching YouTube, so my grasp on all of the different terminology is lacking and searching on the internet for ETL is making it difficult to get to what I believe should be a simple answer.
For a while I thought we wanted to eventually graduate to using SSIS, but I learned that SSIS was something that was used primarily if you had a database on prem. I've tried looking at dynamic SQL using BULK INSERT to find that BULK INSERT doesn't work with Azure DBs. Etc.
Recently I've been learning about Azure Data Factory and something called Bulk Copy Program using Windows Power Shell.
Does anybody have any suggestions as to what technology I should look at for a small-scale BI reporting solution?
I suggest you using the Data Factory, it has good performance for the large data transfer.
Refence here: Copy performance and scalability achievable using ADF
Copy Active supports you using table data, query or stored procedure to filter data in Source:
Sink support you select the destination table, stored procedure or auto create table(bulk insert) to receive the data:
Data Factory Mapping Data Flow provides more features for the data convert.
Ref: Copy and transform data in Azure SQL Database by using Azure Data Factory.
Hope this helps.
I work in my companies small IT department. I have been creating automation via VBA in Excel to pull data from SQL and put it into Excel, then dynamically format and summarize the data. The issue I am running into is the IT department does not want to give anyone outside the IT department SQL Read-Only Access. They view SQL as a privilege not a right...even if it is only Read-Only. They claim security reasons.
Just to be clear, we are NOT installing SQL on these peoples' computers nor do they have the technical understanding on how to write queries. Also, they can already view all the information on the front-end website.
I currently have to specify which database and which tables they can have access to and it takes about 1-2 weeks to give them access (they drag their feet doing the requests).
I am not trying to vent, I am actually wondering do they have a legit concern about security and is this actually a best practice on their part?
The worst thing that could happen is a user knows just enough to connect MS Access to the database, write some poor queries, and grind everything to a halt. You should always have non-IT users access data in a safe, structured way. Especially if this database is a transactional one, and not a reporting database.
Sure, they can access all the data per business process. So then, create a nice, safe query to read all the data and dump it to Excel - if that's what the users want.
Otherwise, IT-created queries - preferably in Stored Procedures - should be reading the data and presenting it to the users.
So it's not a security issue per se. It's more an issue of "we don't want non-IT users getting crafty and bringing down the database with poorly written queries."
I believe the connection properties to the SQL server is embedded in your VBA code, as long as the code is not visible to the user then there is no way they can query the SQL server directly.
Sounds like you need an SQL read only service account which you can use for Query connections. Create an Excel data connection that has the security details to connect to SQL, then your VBA hooks into that data connection.
I am currently creating a vb.net program in which users upload a song file to the program and then it is saved within the programs files. I have set up the actual saving of the files but would also like to store some meta data of each in a SQL database within my program.
I have looked online and although i now understand the basics of SQL, im still a little fuzzy on how you actually implement this within VB.net. I have already added the library- Imports System.Data.SqlClient but failed to work out how to begin coding in SQL.
The basics of what im trying to acheive is a if statement that will determine wether or not a SQL database has been created in a specific location, and if it hasnt it should create it.
All constructive answers appreciated, thanks.
There are a number of different database engines available. The namespace that you have chosen contains the ADO.NET client classes for Microsoft SQL Server. You would use a connection string to specify how to connect to the database. This would often contain connection information, such as server name, user name, password etc, but it sounds like you want to store data locally.
There is a local version of SQL Server called LocalDB, but I think you would still need quite a lot of the SQL Server components installed for that to work. Although you can package these with your application they may be too large for you, so you may want to look at SQL Server Compact Edition, which is much smaller and allows you to package the whole engine as part of your application and is useful for storing data locally. Compact edition doesn't have quite all of the features that LocalDB does, so you may want to compare the features available for each.
Although you can use the ADO.NET objects to connect to a database, I think most people these days would use a layer on top which transfers data back and forwards between objects in memory and the database. This also allows you to use Linq to query the database in most cases. I personally use Entity Framework. You might want to look into that. There are different ways of configuring EF so you may want to look at a tutorial. Once you have it set up, you will probably find it much easier and safer to work with than writing SQL manually though.
We have a 3gb file of data from our propriartary CRM system which is using SQL as a database.
The CRM is not meeting our needs and we are thinking about moving to Microsoft access and building our own system from the start.
We were wondering if it is possible to easily migrate the SQL database into access?
Thanks for your time.
First of all, it has been a long time since I've had to use MS-Access (thankfully) but I'm not sure Access is suitable for databases of that size. In my opinion, it's best suited to small, desktop-type applications with few concurrent users.
To answer your question, I believe Access offers a data import feature(see under the External Data ribbon in 2013) - though I'd suspect it might balk at the idea of 3GB of data. Edit: Actually this link suggests the max databsae size is 2GB
What might be more useful however, is its Linked Table feature. If I remember correctly this allows you to access data stored in SQL Server (or a similar RDBMS) which is more suited to large volumes of data through an Access front end - complete with pre-canned forms, queries, reports etc..
It is possible and fairly straight forward to move all of your data tables from SQL Server to Access; however, SQL Server is a much more robust database engine than Access. I would highly recommend against that. I have however had very good success using Access (ADP project files) as a front for the interface and using SQL Server as the database back-end for simple to moderate complexity interfaces. If you are not getting the performance you desire from your SQL Server, you might want to consider query performance tuning and looking into memory and hardware upgrades first. I think you will get better and faster results from doing that.
The simple solution would be to “link” Access to SQL server. That way you continue to use a robust data engine, but are free to use all the reporting and coding features of Access.
In this setup then Access simply becomes a “front end” to the existing SQL database.
And you do NOT want to use an ADP project in Access since they are depreciated.
The process is thus to create a blank standard database, and then use linked tables to SQL server. This will not only eliminate the need to import data (which is likely changing all the time).
I've been searching the internet for this question:
What are ways to transfer data and tables on a daily basis from an Oracle's Hyperion to SQL Server 2000?
I am an intern at a company and trying to figure out possible ways to do this. Any help or point in the right direction is greatly appreciated
This is going to depend a lot on specifics. Here are just a few possible solutions:
DTS
DTS is packaged with SQL 2000 and is made for this kind of a task. If written correctly, your DTS package can have good error-handling and be rerunnable/reusable.
SSIS
SSIS is actually packaged with SQL 2005 and above, but you can connect it to other databases. It's basically a better version of DTS. (technically it's radically different than DTS, but has a lot of the same functionality)
Linked Servers
From SQL 2000 you should be able to connect directly to your Oracle database as a linked server. In the pros column this kind of direct access can be easy to work with if you don't have any other technical skills such as DTS or SSIS, but it can be complex to get the initial set-up right and there may be security concerns/issues.
Build Your Own
Depending on what other technologies you use you can build your own application to do the ETL (Extract/Transform/Load, which is what you're doing). This could be in .NET, Java, etc. In the pros column you can use something with which you're familiar but there's a big downside here in that most of the low level type of work is already out there in tools like DTS/SSIS, so why reinvent the wheel?
BCP
You can simply extract the data from Oracle as .csv files (or some other format) and then import them back in using SQL Server's Bulk Copy Process. This can be fast, but there aren't many bells and whistles to go with this. If this is a one-time thing with just a few tables though then this is probably the easiest and fastest way to do it.
Third Party Applications
There are a slew of ETL applications already written out there (Data Import, Data Slave, etc.). They will usually provide wizards and one-click solutions (maybe a few more than one click), but they are also going to cost a bit of extra money.
EDIT:
Given your latest comment, I would probably go with a DTS package that's scheduled in SQL Agent to run daily. You can add in error-handling and have the system email/text/call someone if there's ever an issue (or do positive case reporting - ie. send a message when it's successful so that someone knows that there's a problem if they don't get a message each day.
In our company we use ADO.Net for the same task.
We created a source to Oracle , taking all data and then creating it in SQL server
You could write DTS packages to copy the data, and schedule them to run within Sql Server Agent.
See DTS Overview for information on DTS packages.
Here's a tutorial on creating a DTS package: Creating DTS Packages With SQL Server 2000
Oracle Hyperion is a suite of products, largely unrelated to Oracle's database product. I expect you are referring to a product such as Hyperion Financial Management or Hyperion Strategic Finance. These products have APIs that can be consumed using COM Interop or web services. The data can be extracted from the internal multidimensional database by analyzing the database metadata, creating dimension trees, and then using the information to create selections, that represent subcubes within the database; allowing you to get or set cell data.
I don't know what your level of knowledge of multidimensional databases is, but unless it is substantial you may find the task pretty hard. You also need to get a handle on the particular product API.
My company specializes in these kinds of activities, and we have components for this kind of thing. Drop me a line on my blog if you need further advice.
danielvaughan.org
Cheers,
Daniel
I don't know anything about Hyperion, but SQL Server 2000 is very old and may not have a driver to be able to pull data from Hyperion if the version of that is newer than the year 2000. You may need to look to see if there is a way to push the data from Hyperion rather than pull it into SQL Server 2000. One way i have done this is the past is to create pipe delimited text file from the data base that orginally has the data and palce it in a processing directory. I do know that DTS will process a pipe-delimited text file. So if you can't find a driver to process this data directly, consider if you can push it out to file and then process. You wil have to schedule a time gap between the job on Hyperion that creates the file and the DTS package job. But if you are only doing it once a day, that's prbably not a problme.