On Thursday 2008 December 11 13:45:19 Nuno Magalhães wrote: >Does anyone know a reliable converter to export a bunch of tables in >an M$ excel file to regular SQL92/2003 or, preferable, Oracle? No GUI >required, just an easy way to convert them... Export to CSV (just the data, no headers), create the tables manually, and then you can probably find a loader that will insert the values OR write a fairly trivial one in perl. I can't think of any program that does this off-the-shelf, and there are a few issues with the conversion that might prevent it from being completely automatic: (1) Foreign keys, even if unchecked are a fairly critical part of a good database design and MS Excel doesn't have that information. (2) Every RDBMS I've seen is strongly, statically typed.[1] This means the type of each column has to be declared and every value in that column has to be of that type. Excel is not, so you have to provide that information and if you are wrong you'll get import errors. (3) Both the MS Excel and Oracle RDBMS have closed, un- or poorly-documented file formats. Free software developers tend to focus on open formats, so you'll probably have to get MS Excel to save to an open format (CSV, or Excel's likely incorrect implementation of the RFC) and then have Oracle load from an open format (standard SQL statements, which Oracle generally supports well) as part of the conversion process anyway. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss03@volumehost.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/
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