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ThingieQuery: a SQL plugin for Excel

thingiequery.com

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Re: ThingieQuery: a SQL plugin for Excel

#43
post #41

"SQL"? MSSQL? MySQL? Postgres? Oracle? DB2? There is a the free MySQL Excel plugin ( https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/windows/excel/ )and I think the free MS PowerPivot plugin supports SQL databases too.

It supports connecting to PostgreSQL and MSSQL currently. When you connect to an external engine it opens up a connection, and copies selected Excel tables as temp tables to the destination DB. This makes it easy to combine excel data with existing db data in your queries, and also to move data in easily in either direction.

It uses low level bulk copy operations when importing excel data so it's pretty fast. I did not yet implement support for Oracle because it doesn't have session level temp tables, only global temp tables... I'll see what I can do there.

I haven't used the MySQL Excel plugin so I can't comment on its features...

Re: ThingieQuery: a SQL plugin for Excel

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much, the data will show up fine, by default ThingieQuery doesn't do anything magical with the workbook itself it just reads and if you want writes data to it. You can however explicitly embed a query into a workbook (it gets stored in the CustomXMLParts of the workbook), and you can automate running this query from VBA. For this automation to work, the other computer would need to have ThingieQuery installed, bu…

Excellent, thank you for the reply.

You are very welcome!:)

Re: ThingieQuery: a SQL plugin for Excel

#45
post #39

How does the autocompletion work? Is is context sensitive to suggest only column names after the 'WHERE' clause or will it suggest 'tables and columns'?

Good question. Unfortunately no, not yet. It's not context sensitive, actually it's as dumb as a brick:) If you enter the name of a table followed by a dot, it will offer only the columns from the table. Other than that, it offers pretty much all objects and filters them as you type.

I've been wanting to implement a SQL parser (at least for SQLite) so I can offer meaningful autocomplete, and some other nice features, but it was a lower priority than other things. I've done some work with Antlr a few years ago, but I'm itchin' to roll my own since I'm already dusting off my compiler theory books...

Anyway, why not give it a try, the trial is free:)

Re: ThingieQuery: a SQL plugin for Excel

#47

It looks great. Too bad it's Windows only. The preview of excel 2016 for mac is pretty good and some of our marketing staff are contemplating the idea of migrating to mac. Congrats on the launch, I'm not an excel user myself but I've sent the link to some of my coworkers and they look excited :D

Glad to hear your coworkers are excited!:) I'd love to support mac but unless excel 2016 includes VSTO, it won't be doable.

Re: ThingieQuery: a SQL plugin for Excel

#48
post #24

Very nice tool. It might become very useful at work if I can comvert all the heavy excel users towards SQL queries.

Even basic SQL can make a lot of things easier in Excel, and SQL is not that complex so it might be doable. And the plugin is perfect for teaching SQL to someone, you can immediately see the effects of queries on data. Just sayin... :)

Re: ThingieQuery: a SQL plugin for Excel

#49

I don't know if it's a regional thing or what, but the idiom is usually "color me interested" rather than "paint me interested." Maybe you care, maybe you don't. I've just never seen "paint me interested" like that and thought it was curious.

Point taken:) I have no idea where I got the "paint me xyz" from. Thanks for pointing it out, I changed it to "color me interested"
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