Oracle: Turning a select statement into an Excel file

I don't know how many times a CFO has approached me and asked I know, the data for XYZ is somewhere in the database. Could you quickly get me XYZ and send it to me as Excel.

Usually, getting the data out of the database was fairly easy with a SQL select statement, yet, bringing the data into an excel worksheet was sort of a recurring PITA: I would start SQL Developer, execute the select statement, copy the result set (ctrl-c), open Excel, paste the result set (ctrl-v) then I'd adjust the widths of the columns, and only then I'd save the resulting excel sheet.

Not that these steps are too hard, but I always felt that should be easier. So, I have written the procedure xlsx_writer.sql_to_xlsx. This procedure takes an SQL statement and the name of an Excel file to be written, executes the SQL statement and writes the Excel file.

In SQL*Plus, that would look like:

Of course, this can be written in one line, I have used four lines because of the width limit in this blog.

Links

Source code on github

xlsx_writer on my homepage

Creating Excel (.xlsx) files with Oracle PL/SQL

The XLSX Excel file format is actually a zipped archive of some xml files with the suffix .xlsx rather than .zip This makes it possible to create XLSX files with (almost) any programming language that can create files and zip them. Since I am working with PL/SQL every now and then and I needed to create xlsx files for a reporting solution, I crated a small library: XLSX writer for Oracle. The source code for this library is on this github repository, some examples are on my homepage.