Import de-normalized relational data from Excel into SQL Server

Posted by roryf on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by roryf
Published on 2009-04-17T09:28:05Z Indexed on 2010/05/08 20:28 UTC
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Filed under:

sql-server

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excel

|

import

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etl

I need to import data from an Excel spreadsheet into SQL Server, but the data isn't in a relational/normalized format so the import wizard isn't going to cut it (as far as I know).

The data is in this format:

Category    SubCategory     Name        Description

Category#1  SubCategory#1   Product#1   Description#1
Category#1  SubCategory#1   Product#2   Description#2
Category#1  SubCategory#2   Product#3   Description#3
Category#1  SubCategory#2   Product#4   Description#4
Category#2  SubCategory#3   Product#5   Description#5

(apologies I'm lacking the inventiveness to come up with 'real' data at this time in the morning...)

Each row contains a unique product, but the cateogry structure is duplicated. I want to import this data into three tables:

Category
SubCategory
Product

(I know SubCategory should really be contained within Category, DB was not my design)

I need a way to import unique rows based on the Category and then SubCategory columns, and then when importing the other columns into Product, obtain a reference to the SubCategory based on name.

Short of scripting this, is there any way to do it using the import wizard or some other tool?

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