Bring back Excel support

[cube2222]

It got lost during the rewrite, should be recreated as a plugin.

Should mostly be a copy-paste of the now-deleted excel datasource, as mentioned in #135

[tooolbox]

Two bits of feedback:

• Particularly interested in octosql since I found out that its competitors do things like load the data set into sqlite before querying, which has not worked for me for some of my large data sets.
• Would appreciate having this feature natively without requiring plugins; I just want to be able to download octosql and run it without additional tooling, network connectivity, etc.

[cube2222]

The plugin architecture is meant to keep datasources decoupled from the main repository, so 99% this will be implemented as a plugin.

That said, you won't need additional tooling nor network connectivity. Plugins can be installed using OctoSQL itself and are then available locally octosql plugin install excel. You can also just download the tarball with the binaries from GitHub and put them in the right directory, will work just fine as well.

[tooolbox]

That said, you won't need additional tooling nor network connectivity. Plugins can be installed using OctoSQL itself and are then available locally octosql plugin install excel.

Got it on the tooling bit, but the connectivity thing seems contradictory? I imagine that plugin install is downloading and installing a plugin, which means you need network connectivity. Otherwise how does it get onto your machine?

You can also just download the tarball with the binaries from GitHub and put them in the right directory, will work just fine as well.

Sure, that works.

1. Download binaries from OctoSQL repo and plugin repo
2. Put in folder adjacent to each other
3. Profit?

(Forgive me, I have some machines with interesting network setups that make me hate magical package managers and plugin installers.)

[cube2222]

Got it on the tooling bit, but the connectivity thing seems contradictory?

Sorry, what I meant is that you only need it once, on setup.

Put in folder adjacent to each other

The folder structure is bit more interesting than that, but yeah, basically this.

[tooolbox]

Sorry, what I meant is that you only need it once, on setup.

Gotcha, yeah sometimes I just want to move the binary to another network and run it somewhere I don't have connectivity.

The folder structure is bit more interesting than that, but yeah, basically this.

Awesome. If you have or could make a quick reference on how to set this up, that would be fantastic. (Not needed until after Excel support is added.)

Thanks for your all your work!

[m2acgi]

+1

natively without requiring plugins; I just want to be able to download octosql and run it without additional tooling, network connectivity, etc.

[wdepril]

Excel support would be awesome, we now have to convert to csv first before we can query. It would save that step. Excel support also allows us to automate excel to csv conversions in other use cases. Plugin install seems straightforward so no issue with that.