Excel – Load Excel data sheet to Oracle database

There are ways of doing this in optional parts of the standard, but a lot of databases support their own way of doing it.

A really good site that talks about this and other things is http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/#select-limit.

Basically, PostgreSQL and MySQL supports the non-standard:

SELECT...
LIMIT y OFFSET x 

Oracle, DB2 and MSSQL supports the standard windowing functions:

SELECT * FROM (
  SELECT
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY key ASC) AS rownumber,
    columns
  FROM tablename
) AS foo
WHERE rownumber <= n

(which I just copied from the site linked above since I never use those DBs)

Update: As of PostgreSQL 8.4 the standard windowing functions are supported, so expect the second example to work for PostgreSQL as well.

Update: SQLite added window functions support in version 3.25.0 on 2018-09-15 so both forms also work in SQLite.

In Oracle, to insert multiple rows into table t with columns col1, col2 and col3 you can use the following syntax:

INSERT ALL
   INTO t (col1, col2, col3) VALUES ('val1_1', 'val1_2', 'val1_3')
   INTO t (col1, col2, col3) VALUES ('val2_1', 'val2_2', 'val2_3')
   INTO t (col1, col2, col3) VALUES ('val3_1', 'val3_2', 'val3_3')
   .
   .
   .
SELECT 1 FROM DUAL;