T-Sql on Matt Thornton

The OLE DB provider Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.12.0 for linked server (null) reported an error. Access denied.

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:11:01 +0000

I’m noting this here primarily because I’m almost certain to trip over this again in the future. If you want to use the ACE or JET providers to read an e.g., Excel spreadsheet to an e.g., SQL Server table, then something like this is possible. Assuming you had a simple Excel workbook (Book1.xlsx) and in Sheet1 you had

Col1 Col2
Test Test2

You could use this to load it:

SELECT * INTO #tmpTable FROM OPENROWSET('Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0','Excel 12.0 Xml;HDR=YES;Database=C:TempBook1.xlsx','SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]')<br /> GO<br /> SELECT * from #tmpTable<br />

Auto generate SQL audit tables and database triggers

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:56:48 +0000

One approach to monitoring version history of items in SQL tables is to use an _Audit table version with database triggers. However, the creation and maintenance of the tables and triggers can be time consuming. This post provided a nice script to automate the creation but unfortunately it suffered a few issues. In the comments, someone posted a sproc version of the script - but unfortunately this was also broken.

So I have tidied it up and fixed the issues. My host doesn’t let me post SQL in these posts, so you can view the file here.

Quick tip: Use OVER to get row numbers in subsets

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:38:27 +0000

Consider the following. You have a set of data. Within the data are multiple subsets that share an identifier. WIthin your main set, you need to number the subsets for each item within it, e.g.,

Data

ID SubsetID Name Lots more columns…
———- ———-
1 ABC Dave
2 DEF Trev
3 DEF Bob
4 DEF Steve
5 HIJ Jim
6 HIJ Bilbo

and you want something like

ID SubsetID SubsetPosition Name Lots more columns…
———- ———-
1 ABC 1 Dave
2 DEF 1 Trev
3 DEF 2 Bob
4 DEF 3 Steve
5 HIJ 1 Jim
6 HIJ 2 Bilbo