Re: postgreSQL

[Martyn Shiner <martyn shiner severndelta co uk>]

> Since no one has responded, I will describe my experience with a similar

> problem.  However, note these caveats: I used Excel data* and the 
> database was various versions of Sybase (11.x and 12.5.x).
>
> The data I used were comment delimited extracts taken from the 
> spreadsheets.  The syntax, as I remember it was along the lines of:
>
>     INSERT [cdd**] INTO [tablename]
>
> where I assume PostgreSQL would have similar operational syntax.  To 
> work properly the ordering to the delimited data would have to 
> correspond exactly the target table structure (i.e. the column 
> ordering).  From my memory  data type attached to the column determined 
> the stored value.  Thus, a gross mismatch of datatypes, e.g. a text 
> string of non-numeric characters would corrupt your data when a float 
> was expected.
>
> Let me note too that datasets from Excel could use other characters to 
> delimit data cells, e.g. space, quotes, etc.
>
> I hope that helps a bit.
>
> * Gnumeric seems to be quite similar in features and operation to Excel,

> hence, this should not be an issue.
>
> ** comment delimited data (or other character delimiter)

Thanks for the information - I guessed this would be so as OOo also has
the column ordering/type restrictions.

My big problem is that I don't see ANY options for external data from a
database even though there is some reference to this in the docs. My
version is 1.8.3 from the ubuntu 8.10 repository - could it be that this
version is compiled without libgda support?

-- 

Regards

Martyn Shiner