Latest revision as of 14:13, March 15, 2009

The xlSQL-Y8 JDBC driver for Excel

This page is under construction. For more information, please revisit it in the future

Description

The Excel JDBC driver xlSQL-Y8 is an enhancement in many aspect of the xlSQL-Y7 driver. This version was created especially to correct bugs and add enhancements to the previous version in order to make the driver correctly work with the DataMaster Protege plug-in. However, no change made to the driver is DataMaster or Protege specific. For the list of the enhancements introduced in this new version, please read the New Features section.

Here is a short description of this driver qouted from its original authors:
"xlSQL is a JDBC Driver for Excel ( CSV, XML and other ) document data sources. Documents can be read and written with SQL as if they were tables in a database. In the case of Excel, xlSQL maps a directory with Excel files to a database, workbooks to schemas, and sheets to tables. These tables can be queried with the full SELECT syntax of either the HSQLDB or MySQL (more to follow) SQL dialect. Native xlSQL is a rich subset of SQL for creating, altering and populating documents ( spreadsheets ). The xlSQL Yn codebase, although alpha, has been taken into production at numerous sites worldwide. xlSQL has proven to be a very stable read-write SQL Excel JDBC Driver. Continuous development efforts are aimed to explore the limits of the XLS fileformat for storing relational data and to support other document formats as CSV and XML."

Instructions for using the xlSQL-Y8 driver with DataMaster

DataMaster is a plug-in for importing schema and data from relational databases into Protege, and it works with any (well implemented) ODBC/JDBC driver. This driver can be used with DataMaster to import concepts into a Protege ontology from appropriately formatted Excel spreadsheets, as if they were tables in a relational database.

Supposing that your Protege installation comes with DataMaster or has already DataMaster plug-in installed, to use this driver with DataMaster you have to do the following:

1. Download the archive containing xlSQL-Y8 driver as described in the Download section.

2. Extract XlSQL-Y8.zip in the [PROTEGE_INSTALLATION_DIR]\plugins\edu.stanford.smi.protegex.datamaster directory. This will create an xlSql-Y8 directory.

3. Move the following files to the [PROTEGE_INSTALLATION_DIR]\plugins\edu.stanford.smi.protegex.datamaster directory (identified in the following as [DataMasterPluginDir]) near the DataMaster.jar:

   [DataMasterPluginDir]/xlSql-Y8/xlSQL_Y8.jar 

   [DataMasterPluginDir]/xlSql-Y8/lib/commons/commons-cli-1.0.jar 

   [DataMasterPluginDir]/xlSql-Y8/lib/hsqldb/hsqldb.jar 

   [DataMasterPluginDir]/xlSql-Y8/lib/jconfig/jconfig.jar 

   [DataMasterPluginDir]/xlSql-Y8/lib/jexcelapi/jxl.jar 

The rest of the jar files under the xlSql-Y8 directory structure are not necessary for Protege.

4. You are ready to use the xlSQL driver with DataMaster, by specifying the following values in the DataMaster TabWidget:

   Driver name:   com.nilostep.xlsql.jdbc.xlDriver 

   JDBC URL:      jdbc:nilostep:excel:[FullPathToTheDirectoryContainingTheExcelFiles]

Download

For the moment the only place to download the xlSQL-Y8 driver is the following wiki page: File:XlSQL-Y8.zip

New Features

List of new features is coming soon.