Data Comparison

[Madhivanan]

I have an Employee table with 3000 records and an Excel file having the
modified data of those emplyoees. Some of the data of Excel may be same
as that of table data but some may differ. EmpId is the unique field.
Other than this field, other fields of Excel may have modified data.I
need to compare the data from SQL Server table with Excel Data.
I decided to write a VB Program having two recordsets,one for SQL
Server and other for Excel and compare each field's value. If the
modified value is found then update that to table. Is there any way to
compare in SQL Server itself?

Madhivanan

[Simon Hayes]

Probably the easiest way is to create a second Employee table with the
same (or similar) structure as the current one. You can load the new
data into it with DTS or bcp.exe, and it's then easy to compare
whatever you want with SQL queries. This is quite a common general
technique for importing data - load into a staging table, check/clean
the data, then INSERT/UPDATE the destination table.

There are other options too, such as creating a linked server pointing
at the .xls file, but I would say that loading the data is probably the
simplest.

Simon

[Madhivanan]

Yes, I already decided to create new table with same structure and
export Excel to SQL Server table. Thanks

Madhivanan