Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

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Excel Add-In for Amazon Redshift

The Amazon Redshift Excel Add-In is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live Amazon Redshift data, directly from Microsoft Excel.

Use Excel to read, write, and update databases. Perfect for mass imports / exports / updates, data cleansing & de-duplication, Excel based data analysis, and more!

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Pull data, automate spreadsheets, and more with the QUERY formula.

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

  • Connection: Either the connection name, such as RedshiftConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Redshift data, separated by semicolons.

    To connect to Redshift, set the following:

    • Server: Set this to the host name or IP address of the cluster hosting the Database you want to connect to.
    • Port: Set this to the port of the cluster.
    • Database: Set this to the name of the database. Or, leave this blank to use the default database of the authenticated user.
    • User: Set this to the username you want to use to authenticate to the Server.
    • Password: Set this to the password you want to use to authenticate to the Server.

    You can obtain the Server and Port values in the AWS Management Console:

    1. Open the Amazon Redshift console (http://console.aws.amazon.com/redshift).
    2. On the Clusters page, click the name of the cluster.
    3. On the Configuration tab for the cluster, copy the cluster URL from the connection strings displayed.
  • 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 Redshift 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.
    3. =CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Orders WHERE ShipCountry = '"&B6&"'","User="&B1&";Password="&B2&";Database="&B3&";Server="&B4&";Port="&B5&";Provider=Redshift",B7)
  3. Change the filter to change the data.