XLSX (Excel)
The sq Excel driver implements connectivity
for Microsoft XLSX
files and variants.
Excel is a document source and thus its data is ingested and cached.
Note also that an Excel source is read-only; you can’t insert values into the source.
Supported file formats
The driver supports .xlsx, .xlam, .xlsm,.xltm and .xltx. Note that even
if the file format is, say, .xlam, the driver type is still xlsx. The driver
does not support the older .xls and .xlsb formats.
Add source
When adding an XLSX source via sq add, the location string is simply the filepath.
For example:
$ sq add ./sakila.xlsx
@sakila_xlsx xlsx sakila.xlsx
You can also pass an absolute filepath (and, in fact, any relative path is expanded to
an absolute path when saved to sq’s config).
sq add command accepts a --driver=TYPE flag, e.g. --driver=xlsx. However,
in practice this flag can be omitted, because sq can detect
the driver type.Worksheets
When an XLSX source is added, sq treats each sheet as a separate database table.
Thus a sheet named actor can be queried as @sakila_xlsx.actor.
Empty sheets are ignored, and can’t be queried.
Header row
Excel sheets will often have a header row containing column names. If the sheet
doesn’t have a header row, by default sq will name the columns A, B, C, etc.
(Note that the column naming behavior is configurable.
Generally, sq will automatically detect, for each sheet,
whether or not the first row is a header row. If the header row detection
is having difficulty with your workbook, you can explicitly specify that a
header row is present (or not) via --ingest.header.
# Explicitly specify that a header row exists (in each sheet)
$ sq add --ingest.header ./sakila.xlsx
# Explicitly specify no header row
$ sq add --ingest.header=false ./sakila-no-header.xlsx
--ingest.header is that the option applies on a per-source basis, not per-sheet.
That is to say: when using --ingest.header, every sheet in the workbook
should have a header, or none of the sheets should have a header.Duplicate columns
If the header row has duplicate column names, the later columns are renamed. For example, these columns:
actor_id, first_name, actor_id
become:
actor_id, first_name, actor_id_1
The renaming behavior is configurable via ingest.column.rename.
Column kind
When ingesting an Excel workbook, sq attempts to detect the data “kind”
of each column (int, float, text, etc.). Thus an Excel date becomes a date in
the backing DB, an Excel
number becomes an int or a float, and various date & time values are parsed
into an appropriate DB type. See the column kind section
for more on this mechanism.