Inserting more than 1000 rows from Excel into SQLServer

Question

I'm new to Sql but what is the best way to insert more than 1000 rows from an excel document into my database(Sql server 2008.)

For example I'm using the below query:

   INSERT INTO mytable(companyid, category, sub, catalogueref)
   VALUES
   ('10197', 'cat', 'sub', '123'),
   ('10197', 'cat2', 'sub2', '124')

This is working fine but there is a limit of inserting 1000 records and I have 19000 records and I don't really want to do 19 separate insert statements and another question, is that the company id is always the same is there a better way then writing it 19000 times?

Solution 1

Microsoft provides an import wizard with SQL Server. I've used it to migrate data from other databases and from spreadsheets. It is pretty robust and easy to use.

Solution 2

Just edit the data in Excel or another program to create N amount of insert statements with a single insert for each statement, you'll have an unlimited number of inserts. For example...

INSERT INTO table1 VALUES   (6696480,'McMurdo Station',-77.846,166.676,'Antarctica','McMurdo')
INSERT INTO table1  VALUES  (3833367,'Ushuaia',-54.8,-68.3,'America','Argentina')
...19,000 later
INSERT INTO table1 VALUES   (3838854,'Rio Grande',-53.78769,-67.70946,'America','Argentina')

Solution 3

There are several options, the Import Wizard which Erik suggests, or SSIS is another good one.

Read here: Import Excel spreadsheet columns into SQL Server database

Solution 4

Ok, it's a late answer but I ran into this very same problem and found a solution that worked twice as fast as @Nur.B's solution for a 7K-row insertion.

Note: whenever possible prefer to use TRANSACTIONS when dealing with large amounts of data.

INSERT INTO mytable(companyid, category, sub, catalogueref)
SELECT '10197', 'cat', 'sub', '123' UNION ALL
SELECT '10197', 'cat2', 'sub2', '124' UNION ALL
-- ... other N-thousand rows
SELECT '10197', 'catN-1', 'subN-1', '12312' UNION ALL
SELECT '10197', 'catN', 'subN', '12313'; -- don't add "UNION ALL" statement on the last line

View more solutions

Comments

[jollarvia]

This is a good solution. But what I would like to know is what orientation is your original data in? Is it Excel? Access? You could just export a csv file if it is and use that. If the data's configured some other way there could be other solutions.

[Erik Gillespie]

The asker has the data in an Excel spreadsheet so exporting to CSV and then using another tool such as bcp would also be an option. The user interface of the import wizard is pretty handy when import issues start coming up though.

[jollarvia]

Yeah my moneys on the import wizard

[user3545217]

Thanks Erik, the interface for this is really easy to use!

[Oliver]

This turns out to be a lot faster to achieve than splitting the INSERT statement into batches of 1000 value tuples. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

[Kirby]

to improve the answer, please give some explanation as to the reason that this works.

[Nur.B]

follow the link: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/…