As they say necessity is the mother of all invention. In this case I need a simple tool to prep comma delimited files before importing them into a MySQL database. I had tried using the tools provided in PhpMyAdmin for importing csv and tab delimited text files without any luck. Each file required some tweaks for string delimiting, column names, etc. After a few hours of frustration I decided to create a tool to convert csv and tab delimited text files into import or update SQL statements, which can easily be used in any RDBMS. Download it here.
The import tool is super easy to use. First you select the csv or txt file you wish to import, set a few options for the import type, string delimiting and how to handle the column headers. Next you can view the columns contained in the file, you can edit the names to be used for the SQL statements and also exclude any columns from the import. Once the setup is complete you can run a quick preview to see how the data will look. If everything looks good you can generate a file that you can use in MySQL or any other RDBMS to import or update data. At any point after selecting the file to import you can also generate the sql file if you wish to skip the steps in between by clicking the 'finish' button.
Step 1 - Setup options
Step 2 - Column Setup
Step 3 - Import Preview
This is just the first pass at this tool, I'm sure there are a few bugs I have not run across yet, so please feel to try it out and report back on any bugs or issues you run across, or any features you would like to see added.
Derrick Grigg is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) freelance contractor based in Toronto, Canada. He specializes in architecting and developing applications using a variety of technologies, most notably Flash, Flex and Coldfusion.
May 14, 2008 at 11:26 AM
Awesome tool Derrick!
Jul 08, 2008 at 2:42 PM
Hi Derrick,
very cool stuff here !!!
a next feature could be, a textInput to choose the colum delimiter. A lot of CSV file contain semicolon as delimiter.
Are you planing to release the source of the project ?
Cheers,
Erick
Sep 05, 2008 at 10:50 AM
Download page doesnt open.
Jan 05, 2009 at 5:55 PM
WOW, very cool. Flex is really new to me, I have experience in the java web based app world and flex is just so clean and fun to use (from end user stand point). Going to play around, thanks for the post and the example app.
Jan 23, 2009 at 10:50 AM
great tool, unfortunately it doesn't support special chars/letters in spanish like é or ñ etc.
Jun 04, 2010 at 4:18 AM
what a great help! thanks for this
Jun 14, 2010 at 7:37 AM
I needed an ETL for a project I was working on. I wanted to create mine until I stumbled on yours and it looks good though. Only mine version is supposed to take a .xls file(MS Excel) importing the data into MySQL. This is a good starting point though. But is there anytime we would have opportunoty to see under the hood. Maybe it would give me a clue.