Oh sure, Dusty. The first part of my note wasn't written to you, but to others on the list who were kindly chiming in with other solutions. I'm not knocking those attempts at all. I'm just saying that the 700+ tools and resources on the list are there for this very reason, to help people find alternatives. I just want to implore people (at least my homies here in the ATL) to keep it in mind when answering questions for folks.
As for your question of whether you might "just use the files themselves as the database rather than import and use MS SQL", well, sure. That can work. It does depend on how often you'll query versus update the data. Even if you didn't want to put it into a DB, you might want to save it in a memory variable and reuse that using query of queries or a cached query, sure. For those who've never considered using CFQUERY to read a text file (or as in Dusty's case, an Excel file), it is possible. Besides the info I offered in the JDBC/ODBC section of the CF411 category on ways to process Excel files, I'll also point out a blog entry I did several years ago where I used this technique to query a file that had zip code info. Besides showing how I did it, I, too, debated whether importing it to a db was better: http://cfmxplus.blogspot.com/2002/08/zip-code-database-folks-if-youve.html /charlie From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dusty Hale Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 1:54 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ACFUG Discuss] excel or csv to database table Many thanks Charlie. I just got in the office and read this. Honestly I have been out of the ACFUG loop for a bit and completely forgot about these resources. So I will give this some loving :-) ... My other thought would be ask if you think it would be ok to just use the files themselves as the database rather than import and use MS SQL. This way the files could just be uploaded to the server and overwritten when they need to be updated. There are basically 5 files with some location data in it that are used for a specialized dealer locator app. My thought was maybe I could just read the files into a select query and then loop the query to filter the records to be displayed. There will never be more than several hundred records in the excel files. However the site that will use it may have a fair amount of traffic so I didn't know if reading the files might become a problem. Perhaps I could read them into a cached query to solve that problem? Does anyone see any reason why this approach would not work? Dusty On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Charlie Arehart <[email protected]> wrote: No love from anyone for CF411. :-( How can I get people to say, whenever anyone asks "what tools are there to do xyz", to tell them to check out cf411.com. I'm not selling anything there. :-) It exists precisely to help with these questions. Dusty, check out: Excel File Processing Tools http://www.cf411.com/#excel for several different kinds and dozens of different resources for doing CF/Excel processing, in both directions. I realize you may wonder if I can say which of these many excel approaches would be best for what you need, but I'm afraid I can't vouch for any. With 700+ tools/resources on the list (in 125+ categories), I really can't use them all. But I do offer brief descriptions and links, which should help you consider the options. (I also did an article presenting this info in the last FAQU, in my back page column, if you have that.) Hope that's helpful. /charlie ------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, manage your profile @ http://www.acfug.org?fa=login.edituserform For more info, see http://www.acfug.org/mailinglists Archive @ http://www.mail-archive.com/discussion%40acfug.org/ List hosted by http://www.fusionlink.com -------------------------------------------------------------
