updating a feature class from an EXCEL spreadsheet

Question

I created feature classes that only contains the data from an EXCEL file. I did this to enable the search function to search the data in these tables. The FCs also have relationships between themselves and other feature classes that have spatial reference. The database is an ARCSDE SQL Express (Parent) on a server and replicates to three other servers (all Child) using ArcGIS 10.1.

The problem: I receive routine updates to the data in the form of an edited version of the original EXCEL file. There are over 30,000 records with scores of fields. The edits can exceed one hundred per day. I tried running delete rows and upload the new data on each feature class with it's respective spreadsheet, but the delta tables do not pick up those changes so the changes do not replicate to the child. I have explored Data Management tools for "Compare" and tried running Oject Loader during an edit session - all to no avail.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

It sounds like the core problem is detecting the changes to each Excel sheet. Can't you use T-SQL or ADO to compare the latest Excel sheet to the previous version and then process only the new records?

• geonerd: This sounds like a good path to go on but I am not familiar with either T-SQL or ADO. I did some searching and could only find comments about linking the EXCEL table in the Access database and doing a comparison, this won't work because I am using a SDE database. Could you provide some further information? Maybe a direction to go in for some help. Thank you for the input.
• klewis: I found a free tool named ExcelCompare. This will report the changes between two spreadsheets. github.com/na-ka-na/ExcelCompare