Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Azure Data Catalog Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Azure Data Catalog provides formulas that can query Azure Data Catalog data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Azure Data Catalog data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following:

=CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

• Query: The declaration of the Azure Data Catalog data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as AzureDataCatalogConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Azure Data Catalog data, separated by semicolons.

  You can optionally set the following to read the different catalog data returned from Azure Data Catalog.

  <>CatalogName: Set this to the CatalogName associated with your Azure Data Catalog. To get your Catalog name, navigate to your Azure Portal home page > Data Catalog > Catalog Name

  Connect Using OAuth Authentication

  You must use OAuth to authenticate with Azure Data Catalog. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Azure Data Catalog using the browser. For more information, refer to the OAuth section in the help documentation.

• ResultLocation: The cell that the output of results should start from.

Pass Spreadsheet Cells as Inputs to the Query

The procedure below results in a spreadsheet that organizes all the formula inputs in the first column.

1. Define cells for the formula inputs. In addition to the connection inputs, add another input to define a criterion for a filter to be used to search Azure Data Catalog data, such as Name.
2. In another cell, write the formula, referencing the cell values from the user input cells defined above. Single quotes are used to enclose values such as addresses that may contain spaces.

=CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Tables WHERE Name = '"&B2&"'","InitiateOAuth="&B1&";Provider=AzureDataCatalog",B3)

👁 Formula inputs used in this example. (Google Apps is shown.)

3. Change the filter to change the data. 👁 The outputs of the formula. (Google Apps is shown.)