将Excel集成为数据库管理的一部分

Question

I realize this is not a very specific question that is open to different opinions, but answering it requires technical expertise that I do not currently have.

My team of 10 people continually maintains and updates a SQL database of approximately 1 million records and 100 fields. We are a market research outfit - most of the data points are modeled assumptions that we need to update frequently as new information becomes available.

We use a .NET web interface to update/insert/delete. However, this interface is clunky and slow. For example:

• We cannot copy/paste in a row of numbers; eg, budgeted amounts across several time periods;
• We cannot copy/paste similar dimension values across multiple records;
• We cannot create new records and fill it's contents quickly
• Cannot assess the effect of your changes on your dataset, as you could with Excel

Most of us are more inclined to navigate data, change values and test our assumptions in Excel, and then go back and make changes in the .NET interface.

My question is:

• is it possible for multiple users to simultaneously use Excel as a content management system for a custom SQL database? I would design a workbook with tabs that would be specifically designed to upload to the database, and on other tabs analysts could quickly and easily perform their calculations, copy/paste, etc.
• If Excel is not ideal, are there other CMS solutions out there that I could adapt to my database? I was looking at something like this, but I have no idea if it is ideal: http://sqlspreads.com/
• If the above is not realistic, are there ways that a .NET CMS interface can be optimized to 1) run queries faster 2) allow copy/paste, or 3) other optimization?

Answer 1

Having multiple people working on one Excel sheet won't work. What you want to do it create an Excel template that is the same for everyone. Then you have have everyone entering data in on their templates. Write a script that takes this template and uploads it to the database table. You can have a template for each table/view and then you have join tables or views to get a bigger picture of all the data.

Answer 2

it's possible to do something like that in Excel - but it's not that easy. I created such a solution for one of my customers. 400 to 500 users are downloading data from a MS-SQL server into Excel. The data can be changed there and uploaded back to the server then. This works for pure line by line as well as for more complex reporting decks. But as I said: to built such a solution isn't a quick one.

Personally I would try to improve the .NET frontend. Because if it is so slow then I would guess you are doing something wrong there. On the end of the day it doesn't make such a great difference what kind of frontend you use. You will always face similar problems.