Our database needs to be filled with the zip code for every state in our country, we are provided with a catalog of zip codes in a xls file, we have to import this file to a table in a database hosted in Windows Azure.
I don't know if Stack Overflow allows me to post a link to our xls, but I'll describe the structure of the file:
Every sheet holds the zip code information for a whole state, inside every sheet we have fifteen columns with information such as zip code, type of terrain, type of area, locality, state, city, etc. Every sheet has the same columns and the information inside the cells may contain special characters (i.e. á, é, ó, ú, etc.) normal to Spanish language and this special characters need to be preserved. Also some cell may be empty or not and blank spaces are likely to appear in the contents of the cells (i.e. Villa de Montenegro).
We are looking for a way to import every sheet into our table without losing special characters or skipping empty cells. We have no prior experience doing this kind of task and wanted to know what is the best way to import it.
We tried a suggestion of importing the xls to CSV files and then importing those CSV to our database, but we tried some of the variations of the macro recommended here but the CSV are generated with many errors (Macros aren't our forte).
In short, what is the best way to import our xls to an Azure database table without losing empty cells, special characters nor failing when blank spaces are inside a cell?
We found an easy, although slow, way to copy the contents from an xls using Visual Studio, the version we used was 2012 but it works with 2008 and 2013 too.
- Open the Server Explorer.
- Add a new connection, the url for the database is required, the credentials are the same as the ones you use to access the database on Azure. Test the connection if you like, if the credentials are correct then you're good to go.
- After the connection has been made, expand the Tables section and select the table you wish to dump your data.
- Right click and select view table data.
- If the table is empty or it has already some data, the workflow is the same. The last record will be empty, select it.
- Go to your xls file, for this to work, the number and order of the columns must be the same as the table you will be dumping the data. Select the rows desired, copy them.
- Return to Visual Studio, while the last empty row is selected paste the data. The data will start to copy directly into your Azure database.
- Depending on your internet connection and the amount of data you're coping, this might take a long time.
This is an easy solution, although not optimal. This works if you don't own SQL Server with all of its tools. Still gotta check if this works on the express edition, will update when I test.
I recently had to migrate some data in a similar way. I used the SQL Server 2014 Import and Export Data Wizard. I initially tried with a .csv, but it was finicky about quoted commas and such. When I saved it as a .xlsx file, I was able to upload it without a problem. It's pretty straight forward to use, just select your xls file as the source, configure the connection to your Azure database, next-next-next, and hopefully you get the happy path. I wrote about it on my blog, step by step with screenshots.
