Startup Idea: Automated SQL Queries to Excel Application

Startup idea to build an application that streamlines the process of updating, executing, and formatting SQL Server queries for better business intelligence analysis. The application should automate creating and formatting reports in Excel from SQL Server queries, replacing text within these queries, and handling large data records without running out of memory.

I'm a business intelligence analyst within the reporting department within the finance industry. Each month across dozens of clients, we have about 15 SQL Server queries per client that have to be updated, executed in SQL Server, saved to Excel, and then formatted in Excel.

It takes about 20 hours to create all of these reports each month. We usually have only 2-3 days to work on these reports, so we usually have to work many hours for 2-3 days each month.

I would pay for this application since it would save about $10,000 per year in employee hours and satisfy our customers by being able to report on data sooner. I'm surprised that SQL Server doesn't already have this feature.

Creating an application to automate this process would be a huge benefit for us, and also for many other companies using SQL Server or Oracle. The first step would be to create a feature to find and replace certain text within all of the queries (.txt files).

This would allow the month in each query to be quickly replaced. Then, the application could execute each query and save the report to Excel.

Then, each report could be automatically formatted by adding borders to all cells with data, bolding the text and centering the headers (row 1), freezing the panes for the first row, and then automatically saving each Excel file. We also run hundreds of other queries throughout each month in SQL Server that we have to save and format to Excel. Many queries have multiple SELECT statements, and copying and pasting the result of each SELECT statement into Excel can be time-consuming.

Creating an application to automatically save the result of each SELECT statement to a different worksheet in Excel would save a lot of time. Some queries with approximately 300,000 to 1,000,000 records run out of memory -- copying and pasting the results from these queries isn't possible, but developing an application to save them to Excel wouldn't make the computer run out of memory. The application could have two options. First, it could run all queries with a .sql extension within the same folder.

Submitter: Brandon Podell, (view contact info).