I work on a team that regularly supports users by providing them with data from our production database. The catch is, I’m the only one on the team who can access that database. Whenever someone needs specific information — say a list of recent orders or the details of a set of customers — they’d come to me with a request. My role, then, was to log into production, run the queries, and hand over an Excel file with the results.
At first, I didn’t mind. It was part of my job. But as the requests piled up — often the same few queries repeated, or small variations on existing ones — I realized how much time I was spending just exporting data. I searched for a tool to automate this but found everything too cumbersome: either it had too many features I didn’t need, or it was too complicated to set up. I needed something simpler.
That’s when I decided to build my own. All I wanted was a command-line tool that would read a set of queries from a file, run them, and create an Excel file — each query on its own sheet with headers, even if no rows came back. Now, I just place a small executable next to my db_connection.txt file. My teammates give me a .sql file full of queries. I drag and drop the file onto the tool, and within seconds I have an Excel file for them. No more manual copy-paste, no more opening a separate application just to run a quick query.
It’s been a game changer for my productivity. Not only do I get the data out faster, but I can focus more on the work I actually enjoy — solving deeper technical problems and improving our systems. In the end, building a simple solution saved me a ton of repetitive effort and made life easier for everyone on my team.
You can also download the to from this link.
You can contribute to the project in GitHub.
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