I’m writing a series of articles on how to migrate “departmental” data into SQL Server. I also hold workshops on the entire process – from discovering that the data exists to the modeling process and then how to design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Finally I write about (and teach) a few methods on actually moving the data.

One of those options is to use PowerShell. There are a lot of ways even with that choice, but the one I show is to read two columns from the spreadsheet and output statements that would insert the data using a stored procedure. Of course, you could re-write this as INSERT statements, out to a text file for bcp, or even use a database connection in the script to move the data directly from Excel into SQL Server.

This snippet won’t run on your system, of course – it assumes a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet located at c:\temp called VendorList.xlsx. It looks for a tab in that spreadsheet called Vendors. The statement that does the writing just uses one column: Vendor Code. Here’s the breakdown of what I’m doing:

In the first block, I connect to Microsoft Office Excel. That connection string is specific to Excel 2007, so if you need a different version you’ll need to look that up.

In the second block I set up a selection from the entire spreadsheet based on that tab. Note that if you’re only after certain data you shouldn’t get the whole spreadsheet – that’s just good practice.

In the next block I create the text I want, inserting the Vendor Code field as I go.

Finally I close the connection.

Enjoy!

$ExcelConnection= New-Object -com "ADODB.Connection"
$ExcelFile="c:\temp\VendorList.xlsx"
$ExcelConnection.Open("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;`
Data Source=$ExcelFile;Extended Properties=Excel 12.0;")

$strQuery="Select * from [Vendors$]"
$ExcelRecordSet=$ExcelConnection.Execute($strQuery)

do {
Write-Host "EXEC sp_InsertVendors '" $ExcelRecordSet.Fields.Item("Vendor Code").Value "'"
$ExcelRecordSet.MoveNext()}
Until ($ExcelRecordSet.EOF)

$ExcelConnection.Close()

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