Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Lakebase Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as LakebaseConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Lakebase data, separated by semicolons.

  To connect to Databricks Lakebase, start by setting the following properties:
  • DatabricksInstance: The Databricks instance or server hostname, provided in the format instance-abcdef12-3456-7890-abcd-abcdef123456.database.cloud.databricks.com.
  • Server: The host name or IP address of the server hosting the Lakebase database.
  • Port (optional): The port of the server hosting the Lakebase database, set to 5432 by default.
  • Database (optional): The database to connect to after authenticating to the Lakebase Server, set to the authenticating user's default database by default.

  OAuth Client Authentication

  To authenicate using OAuth client credentials, you need to configure an OAuth client in your service principal. In short, you need to do the following:

  1. Create and configure a new service principal
  2. Assign permissions to the service principal
  3. Create an OAuth secret for the service principal

  For more information, refer to the Setting Up OAuthClient Authentication section in the Help documentation.

  OAuth PKCE Authentication

  To authenticate using the OAuth code type with PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange), set the following properties:

  • AuthScheme: OAuthPKCE.
  • User: The authenticating user's user ID.

  For more information, refer to 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 Lakebase 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&"'","DatabricksInstance="&B1&";Server="&B2&";Port="&B3&";Database="&B4&";InitiateOAuth="&B5&";Provider=Lakebase",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.)