MS Excel is among the best tools to develop visual representation of the data and also to manage some manipulations like arithmetic or statistic operations. That’s the reason why businesses opt for this system to keep some internal data like sales records, client’s data, etc. Yet, as much as data volume develops they will often require more powerful program to manage and store all data in safe manner. Database management systems (DBMS) works extremely well in such instances.
When deciding on a database as migration aim it’s sensible to keep the benefits of new system in mind towards MS Excel. The majority of the modern well-known DBMS offer strong features to keep, manage, protect and share data. Yet, if business doesn’t wish to increase the total cost of ownership for a new system, they need to reduce the scope of variants by free database management systems: MySQL or PostgreSQL. When you compare both of these DBMS, it appears clear that PostgreSQL demands much longer to understand it than MySQL and therefore PostgreSQL-based systems take more resources for development. That’s why any business without qualified stuff in PostgreSQL field should think about MySQL as the best goal of migration from Microsoft Excel.
Migration Techniques
There is certainly a simple approach to move Microsoft Excel data to MySQL server. First of all, it is necessary to export data from MS Excel spreadsheet to plain text or CSV, then create empty MySQL table and lastly use “LOAD DATA” command to import data from intermediate storage to MySQL table.
Do you find this approach sufficient? Yes, it is sufficient for mature programmers or database administrators. Because solution requires manual creation of destination MySQL table, all data types should be specified correctly. Or else, the conversion process might cause loss of data or data corruption.
Data Migration Tools
Another method of migration data from MS Excel to MySQL is by using special software created for automating the whole process. One of these simple tools is Excel to MySQL converter which has user friendly wizard style interface and offers enough features for efficient migration of complex MS Excel spreadsheets. The results of migration is accurate concurrently as long as the application does all vital data transformation, handles multibyte character sets plus much more. To obtain more control of the migration process or in case there’s no immediate access to MySQL server, Excel-to-MySQL converter can export data into MySQL script file.
Intelligent Types Conversion
Microsoft Excel has just a couple of data types while group of MySQL types is a lot wider. For instance, MS Excel doesn’t have separate types INTEGER and DOUBLE. To avoid loss of data all MS Excel numbers are transformed into DOUBLE that produces inaccurate appearance of resulting data. To provide a solution of this specific issue, Excel-to-MySQL evaluates each value in each and every column during the conversion process. If all values of particular column allow more precise type conversion the software refines the column type.
Consider that some MS Excel worksheet offers the following values in unique column:
1.000000000000000e+000
3.000000000000000e+001
2.000000000000000e+002
From the begin of the transformation, Excel-to-MySQL produces the matching MySQL column as DOUBLE. During data migration, the software identifies all values in this column are integers, then it will improve column type to INT at the end of the procedure.
Intelligent type’s conversion gives much better results when migrating data from Comma Separated Values (CSV) files. All values from CSV files are initially treated as strings. After examining the data, Excel-to-MySQL converter can identify numbers and dates in CSV fields.
