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Compare SQL Server 2008 value to linked excel file
I have a SQL Server 2008 database that I have linked to an excel file. How can I constantly compare the value of the database to the same value in the excel file? I just need to know when a number changes. For example, lets say I have a product_id, that same product_id is in an excel file that I have my database linked to that someone else maintains and I need to know when that product_id is updated or deleted and send out emails and alert my asp application. I can handle the asp part but I am stumped out the exact query needed to compare an excel worksheet to a table.
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You'd use OPENROWSET to open a connection to your Excel sheet, and then you can query it just like a table and get the value you're interested in. First, make sure that "Ad Hoc Distributed Queries" is enabled, since you'll be querying an external datasource on the fly, and it's an advanced option:
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Once that's done, you can connect to your Excel sheet:
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That will give you the contents of your sheet as a resultset. You can either modify that query to fetch only the value you want, or (and it may be easier depending on what you're doing) you can insert all those contents into a temp table and work with them there, comparing them to your internal SQL Server value.
If you still need some more helping getting this accomplished and you post some more details about what you're trying to do, I can help you refine the query.