Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Greenplum Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Greenplum provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete Greenplum data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Greenplum 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 Greenplum data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as GreenplumConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Greenplum data, separated by semicolons.

  To connect to Greenplum, set the Server, Port (the default port is 5432), and Database connection properties and set the User and Password you wish to use to authenticate to the server. If the Database property is not specified, the default database for the authenticate user is used.

• 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 Greenplum data, such as ShipCountry.
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 Orders WHERE ShipCountry = '"&B6&"'","User="&B1&";Password="&B2&";Database="&B3&";Server="&B4&";Port="&B5&";Provider=Greenplum",B7)

👁 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.)