I have just finished programming a company database in MySQL (I am a student, I am gaining experience). I have to do the data entry but the amount of data to insert is immense. Is there a way to quickly insert large amounts of data without going through Excel?
Best regards.
I use SQLYog , which is free tool on the internet.
You can use this tool to work on MySQL and you won't have to open your Workbench again.
It has a WIDE variety of functions including user-level-access and IMPORTING DATA IN A TABLE VIA CSV.
U need to ensure your data file is saved as .csv and it DOESN'T contain the header row, also you must have a table having the EXACT number of columns (of course), you can insert your entire data (even VERY VERY large data) into your table.
Also while inserting you need to check on "Insert Excel-friendly values", and BOOM....you are done !! :D
please feel free to connect whenever you encounter any issue, it looks hard the first time, then it's VERY VERY easy.
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Intro
I've searched all around about this problem, but I didn't really found a source of knowledge about this, so I'm sorry if this problem seems basic to you, but for me is rather quite intriguing due the fact that I'm having hard time to guess what keywords to use on google in order to retrieve proper info.
Problem Description :
As a matter of fact, i have to issues that i don't know how to deal in a MySQL instance installed in a laptop in a windows environment:
I have a DB in MySQL with 50 tables, of with 15 or 20 tables are tables with original data. The other tables were tables that i generated from the original data tables, in order to properly create tables that would allow me to analyze data in PowerBI. The original data tables are fed by dumps from a ERP Database.
My issue is the following:
How would one automate the process of receiving cumulative txt/csv files (via pen-drive or any other transfer mechanism), store those files into a folder and then update the existing tables with the new information? Is there any reference of best practices to deal with such a scenario?
How can i maintain the good shape of my database with the successive data integration, I mean, how can I make my database scalable and responsive?
Can you point me some sources that would help me with this?
At the moment I imported data into tables, in 2 steps:
1st - I created the table structure with the Workbench import wizard help ( I had to do it this way because the tables have a lot of fields - dozens of them, literally, and those fields need to be in the database). I also inserted primary keys and indexes in those tables;
2nd - I Managed to load the data from the files into those tables, using LOAD DATA IN FILE command.
Some of the fields of the tables created with the import wizard, were created as data type text, with is not necessary in this scenario. I would like to revert those fields to data type NVARCHAR(255) or something, However there are a lot of field to alter the data type and in multiple tables at this point, and i was wondering if i can write a query to do the job of creating all the ALTER TABLES statements i need.
So my issue here is: is it safe to alter the data type in multiple fields in multiple columns (in this case i would like to change fields with datatype text to NAVARCHAR(255))? What is the best way to do this? Can you point me to some sources or best practices for this, please?
Thank you, in advance, for your help.
Cheers
You need a scripting language, not a UI. See mysql commandline tool, the shell of your OS, etc, etc.
DROP DATABASE and reCREATE it
LOAD DATA
Massage the data to get the columns cleaner than what the load data provided
Sic the BI tool on the data.
If you want to discuss Step 3, we need details about what transformations are needed between step 2 and step 4. That includes providing the format or schema for steps 2 and 4.
I hava text file full of values like this:
The first line is a list of column names like this:
col_name_1, col_name_2, col_name_3 ......(600 columns)
and all the following columns have values like this:
1101,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1101,1,3.86,65,0.46418,65,0.57151...
What is the best way to import this into mysql?
Specifically how to come up with the proper CREATE TABLE command so that the data will load itself properly? What is the best generic data type which would take in all the above values like 1101 or 3.86 or 0.57151. I am not worried about the table being inefficient in terms of storage as I need this for a one time usage.
I have tried some of the suggestions in other related questions like using Phpmyadmin (it crashes I am guessing due to the large amount of data)
Please help!
Data in CSV files is not normalized; those 600 columns may be spread across a couple of related tables. This is the recommended way of treating those data. You can then use fgetcsv() to read CSV files line-by-line in PHP.
To make MySQL process the CSV, you can create a 600 column table (I think) and issue a LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE statement (or perhaps use mysqlimport, not sure about that).
The most generic data type would have to be VARCHAR or TEXT for bigger values, but of course you would lose semantics when used on numbers, dates, etc.
I noticed that you included the phpmyadmin tag.
PHPMyAdmin can handle this out of box. It will decide "magically" which types to make each column, and will CREATE the table for you, as well as INSERT all the data. There is no need to worry about LOAD DATA FROM INFILE, though that method can be more safe if you want to know exactly what's going on without relying on PHPMyAdmin's magic tooling.
Try convertcsvtomysql, just upload your csv file and then you can download and/or copy the mysql statement to create the table and insert rows.
I am very new to this and a good friend is in a bind. I am at my wits end. I have used gui's like navicat and sqlyog to do this but, only manually.
His band info data (schedules and whatnot) is in a MYSQL database on a server (admin server).
I am putting together a basic site for him written in Perl that grabs data from a database that resides on my server (public server) and displays schedule info, previous gig newsletters and some fan interaction.
He uses an administrative interface, which he likes and desires to keep, to manage the data on the admin server.
The admin server db has a bunch of tables and even table data the public db does not need.
So, I created tables on the public side that only contain relevant data.
I basically used a gui to export the data, then insert to the public side whenever he made updates to the admin db (copy and paste).
(FYI I am using DBI module to access the data in/via my public db perl script.)
I could access the admin server directly to grab only the data I need but, the whole purpose of this is to "mirror" the data not access the admin server on every query. Also, some tables are THOUSANDS of rows and parsing every row in a loop seemed too "bulky" to me. There is however a "time" column which could be utilized to compare to.
I cannot "sync" due to the fact that the structures are different, I only need the relevant table data from only three tables.
SO...... I desire to automate!
I read "copy" was a fast way but, my findings in how to implement were too advanced for my level.
I do not have the luxury of placing a script on the admin server to notify when there was an update.
1- I would like to set up a script to check a table to see if a row was updated or added on the admin servers db.
I would then desire to update or insert the new or changed data to the public servers db.
This "check" could be set up in a cron job I guess or triggered when a specific page loads on the public side. (the same sub routine called by the cron I would assume).
This data does not need to be "real time" but, if he updates something it would be nice to have it appear as quickly as possible.
I have done much reading, module research and experimenting but, here I am again at stackoverflow where I always get great advice and examples.
Much of the terminology is still quite over my head so verbose examples with explanations really help me learn quicker.
Thanks in advance.
The two terms you are looking for are either "replication" or "ETL".
First, replication approach.
Let's assume your admin server has tables T1, T2, T3 and your public server has tables TP1, TP2.
So, what you want to do (since you have different table structres as you said) is:
Take the tables from public server, and create exact copies of those tables on the admin server (TP1 and TP2).
Create a trigger on the admin server's original tables to populate the data from T1/T2/T3 into admin server's copy of TP1/TP2.
You will also need to do initial data population from T1/T2/T3 into admin server's copy of TP1/TP2. Duh.
Set up the "replication" from admin server's TP1/TP2 to public server's TP1/TP2
A different approach is to write a program (such programs are called ETL - Extract-Transform-Load) which will extract the data from T1/T2/T3 on admin server (the "E" part of "ETL"), massage the data into format suitable for loading into TP1/TP2 tables (the "T" part of "ETL"), transfer (via ftp/scp/whatnot) those files to public server, and the second half of the program (the "L") part will load the files into the tables TP1/TP2 on public server. Both halfs of the program would be launched by cron or your scheduler of choice.
There's an article with a very good example of how to start building Perl/MySQL ETL: http://oreilly.com/pub/a/databases/2007/04/12/building-a-data-warehouse-with-mysql-and-perl.html?page=2
If you prefer not to build your own, here's a list of open source ETL systems, never used any of them so no opinions on their usability/quality: http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/open-source-etl
I think you've misunderstood ETL as a problem domain, which is complicated, versus ETL as a one-off solution, which is often not much harder than writing a report. Unless I've totally misunderstood your problem, you don't need a general ETL solution, you need a one-off solution that works on a handful of tables and a few thousand rows. ETL and Schema mapping sound scarier than they are for a single job. (The generalization, scaling, change-management, and OLTP-to-OLAP support of ETL are where it gets especially difficult.) If you can use Perl to write a report out of a SQL database, you probably know enough to handle the ETL involved here.
1- I would like to set up a script to check a table to see if a row was updated or added on the admin servers db. I would then desire to update or insert the new or changed data to the public servers db.
If every table you need to pull from has an update timestamp column, then your cron job includes some SELECT statements with WHERE clauses based on the last time the cron job ran to get only the updates. Tables without an update timestamp will probably need a full dump.
I'd use a one-to-one table mapping unless normalization was required... just simpler to my opinion. Why complicate it with "big" schema changes if you don't have to?
some tables are THOUSANDS of rows and parsing every row in a loop seemed too "bulky" to me.
Limit your queries to only the columns you need (and if there are no BLOBs or exceptionally big columns in what you need) a few thousand rows should not be a problem via DBI with a FETCHALL method. Loop all you want locally, just make as few trips to the remote database as possible.
If a row is has a newer date, update it. I will also have to check for new rows for insertion.
Each table needs one SELECT ... WHERE updated_timestamp_columnname > last_cron_run_timestamp. That result set will contain all rows with newer timestamps, which contains newly inserted rows (if the timestamp column behaves like I'd expect). For updating your local database, check out MySQL's ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE syntax... this will let you do it in one step.
... how to implement were too advanced for my level ...
Yes, I have actually done this already but, I have to manually update...
Some questions to help us understand your level... Are you hitting the database from the mysql client command-line or from a GUI? Have you gotten to the point where you've wrapped your SQL queries in Perl and DBI, yet?
If the two databases have different, you'll need an ETL solution to map from one schema to another.
If the schemas are the same, all you have to do is replicate the data from one to the other.
Why not just create identical structure on the 'slave' server to the master server. Then create a small table that keeps track of the last timestamp or id for the updated tables.
Then select from the master all rows changed since the last timestamp or greater than the id. Insert them into the matching table on the slave server.
You will need to be careful of updated rows. If a row on the master is updated but the timestamp doesn't change then how will you tell which rows to fetch? If that's not an issue the process is quite simple.
If it is an issue then you need to be more sophisticated, but without knowing the data structure and update mechanism its a goose chase to give pointers on it.
The script could be called by cron every so often to update the changes.
if the database structures must be different on the two servers then a simple translation step may need to be added, but most of the time that can be done within the sql select statement and maybe a join or two.
I'm trying to automate a tedious problem. I get large Excel (.xls or .csv, whatever's more convenient) files with lists of people. I want to compare these against my MySQL database.*
At the moment I'm exporting MySQL tables and reading them from an Excel spreadsheet. At that point it's not difficult to use =LOOKUP() and such commands to do the work I need, and of course the various text processing I need to do is easy enough to do in Excel.
But I can't help but think that this is more work than it needs to be. Is there some way to get at the MySQL data directly from Excel? Alternately, is there a way I could access a reasonably large (~10k records) csv file in a sql script?
This seems to be rather basic, but I haven't managed to make it work so far. I found an ODBC connection for MySQL but that doesn't seem to do what I need.
In particular, I'm testing whether the name matches or whether any of four email addresses match. I also return information on what matched for the benefit of the next person to use the data, something like "Name 'Bob Smith' not found, but 'Robert Smith' matches on email address robert.smith#foo".
You can use ADO and SQL. This example is an insert query, but any query will work:
Excel VBA: writing to mysql database
Why don't you load your CSV data into a dedicated table and perform your searches using MySQLs functions?You could even do the logic from within excel (VBA or dotNET, depending on release)
No matter what you do, you will have to write a bunch of code, if you wan't to detect Robert Smith...
I need to convert data that already exists in a MySQL database, to a SQL Server database.
The caveat here is that the old database was poorly designed, but the new one is in a proper 3N form. Does any one have any tips on how to go about doing this? I have SSMS 2005.
Can I use this to connect to the MySQL DB and create a DTS? Or do I need to use SSIS?
Do I need to script out the MySQL DB and alter every statement to "insert" into the SQL Server DB?
Has anyone gone through this before? Please HELP!!!
See this link. The idea is to add your MySQL database as a linked server in SQL Server via the MySQL ODBC driver. Then you can perform any operations you like on the MySQL database via SSMS, including copying data into SQL Server.
Congrats on moving up in the RDBMS world!
SSIS is designed to do this kind of thing. The first step is to map out manually where each piece of data will go in the new structure. So your old table had four fields, in your new structure fileds1 and 2 go to table a and field three and four go to table b, but you also need to have the autogenerated id from table a. Make notes as to where data types have changed and you may need to make adjustments or where you have required fileds where the data was not required before etc.
What I usually do is create staging tables. Put the data in the denormalized form in one staging table and then move to normalized staging tables and do the clean up there and add the new ids as soon as you have them to the staging tables. One thing you will need to do if you are moving from a denormalized database to a normalized one is that you will need to eliminate the duplicates from the parent tables before inserting them into the actual production tables. You may also need to do dataclean up as there may be required fileds in the new structure that were not required in the old or data converstion issues becasue of moving to better datatypes (for instance if you stored dates in the old database in varchar fields but properly move to datetime in the new db, you may have some records which don't have valid dates.
ANother issue you need to think about is how you will convert from the old record ids to the new ones.
This is not a an easy task, but it is doable if you take your time and work methodically. Now is not the time to try shortcuts.
What you need is an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load#Tools
I don't really know how far an 'ETL' tool will get you depending on the original and new database designs. In my career I've had to do more than a few data migrations and we usually always had to design a special utility which would update a fresh database with records from the old database, and yes we coded it complete with all the update/insert statements that would transform data.
I don't know how many tables your database has, but if they are not too many then you could consider going the grunt root. That's one technique that's guaranteed to work after all.
If you go to your database in SSMS and right-click, under tasks should be an option for "Import Data". You can try to use that. It's basically just a wizard that creates an SSIS package for you, which it can then either run for you automatically or which you can save and then alter as needed.
The big issue is how you need to transform the data. This goes into a lot of specifics which you don't include (and which are probably too numerous for you to include here anyway).
I'm certain that SSIS can handle whatever transformations you need to do to change it from the old format to the new. An alternative though would be to just import the tables into MS SQL as-is into staging tables, then use SQL code to transform the data into the 3NF tables. It's all a matter of what your most comfortable with. If you go the second route, then the import process that I mentioned above in SSMS could be used. It will even create the destination tables for you. Just be sure that you give them unique names, maybe prefixing them with "STG_" or something.
Davud mentioned linked servers. That's definitely another way that you can go (and got my upvote). Personally, I prefer to copy the tables over into MS SQL first since linked servers can sometimes have weirdness, especially when it comes to data types not mapping between different providers. Having the tables all in MS SQL will also probably be a bit faster and saves time if you have to rerun or correct portions of the data. As I said though, the linked server method would probably be fine too.
I have done this going the other direction and SSIS works fine, although I might have needed to use a script task to deal with slight data type weirdness. SSIS does ETL.