If you try to import large Excel files to SQL Developer, it may hang for a long time. But let say you like SQL Developer very much, or you are too lazy to find another tool, here is a way to load large Excel files. By converting the Excel files to CSV SQL Developer can load it much faster.
The tool requires Python, and this week I’m into creating virtual environments, so I will do here. This works where Python works:
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install xlsx2csv
xlsx2csv -h
The last command prints out the options, but usually this is enough:
xlsx2csv whatever.xlsx whatever.csv
Someone judged Excel to be the optimal format for a dataset and sent me a file with 175354 lines and 64 columns. The command above took 2 minutes and 34 seconds on my old Mac. The import of the CSV file with SQL Developer was not super fast, but it did complete after about a coffee break. With the Excel file, SQL Developer errored out during the preview on Java heap space.
The source code is available on Github .