Import de-normalized relational data from Excel into SQL Server
- by roryf
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?