Multiple Data Sources in Microsoft Excel SQL Query - mysql

Question

I have a lot of spreadsheets that pull transactional information from our ERP software into Excel using the Microsoft Query that we then perform other calculations on automatically. Recently we upgraded our ERP system, but management made the decision to leave the transactional history in the old databases to have a clean one going forward in the new system. I still need to have some "rolling 12 months" graphs, but if I use only the old database, I'm missing new data and if I use only the new, I'm missing the last 11 months data.
Is there a way that I can write a query in Excel to pull data from the old database PartTran table and merge it with the new database PartTran table without user intervention each time? For instance, I don't want my users (if possible) to have to have two queries that they copy and paste into one Excel table. The schema of the tables (at least the columns I need) are identically named and defined.

Answer 1

If you want to take a bit of a fun, hacky Excel approach, you could do the "copy-paste" bit FOR your users behind the scenes. Given two similar tables OLD and NEW with structures
+-----+------+-------+------------+
| id | foo | bar | date |
+-----+------+-------+------------+
| 95 | blah | $25 | 2015-06-01 |
| 96 | bork | $12 | 2015-07-01 |
| 97 | bump | $200 | 2015-08-01 |
| 98 | fizz | | 2015-09-01 |
| 99 | buzz | $50 | 2015-10-01 |
| 100 | char | ($1) | 2015-11-01 |
| 101 | mope | | 2015-12-01 |
+-----+------+-------+------------+
and
+----+-----+-------+------------+------+---------+
| id | foo | bar | date | fizz | buzz |
+----+-----+-------+------------+------+---------+
| 1 | cat | ($10) | 2016-01-01 | 285B | 1110111 |
| 2 | dog | $25 | 2016-02-01 | 27F5 | 1110100 |
| 3 | ant | $100 | 2016-03-01 | 1F91 | 1001111 |
+----+-----+-------+------------+------+---------+
... you can union together the data for these two datasets with some prudent excel wizardry as below:
Your UNION table ( named using alt+j+t+a ) should have the following items:
New natural ID
DataSet pointer ( name of old or new table )
Derived ID from original dataset
Columns of data you want from Old & New DataSets
example:
+---------+------------+------------+----+------+-----+------------+------+------+
| UnionId | SourceName | SourceRank | id | foo | bar | date | fizz | buzz |
+---------+------------+------------+----+------+-----+------------+------+------+
| 1 | OLD | | | | | | | |
| 2 | NEW | | | | | | | |
+---------+------------+------------+----+------+-----+------------+------+------+
You will then make judicious use of Indirect() and VlookUp() to derive the lookup id and column targets. Sample code below
SourceRank - helper column
=COUNTIFS([SourceName],[#SourceName],[UnionId],"<="&[#UnionId])
id - the id from the original DataSet
=SMALL(INDIRECT([#SourceName]&"[id]"),[#SourceRank])
Everything else is just VlookUp madness!! Although I've taken the liberty of copying the sample code below for reference
foo =VLOOKUP([#id],INDIRECT([#SourceName]),MATCH(UNION[[#Headers],[foo]],INDIRECT([#SourceName]&"[#Headers]"),0),0)
bar =VLOOKUP([#id],INDIRECT([#SourceName]),MATCH(UNION[[#Headers],[bar]],INDIRECT([#SourceName]&"[#Headers]"),0),0)
date =VLOOKUP([#id],INDIRECT([#SourceName]),MATCH(UNION[[#Headers],[date]],INDIRECT([#SourceName]&"[#Headers]"),0),0)
fizz =VLOOKUP([#id],INDIRECT([#SourceName]),MATCH(UNION[[#Headers],[fizz]],INDIRECT([#SourceName]&"[#Headers]"),0),0)
buzz =VLOOKUP([#id],INDIRECT([#SourceName]),MATCH(UNION[[#Headers],[fizz]],INDIRECT([#SourceName]&"[#Headers]"),0),0)
Output
You'll likely want to make prudent use of If() and/or IfError() to help your users ignore the new column references to the old table and those rows that do not yet have data. Without that, however, you'll end up with something like the below.
This is both ready to accept & read new inputs to both OLD and NEW DataSets and is sortable to get rid of those pesky placeholder rows...
Hope this helps! Happy coding!