Demos

The series of commands used to import a column of data, X from table Y:

% connect to specified database, specifying username and password

connectionA = database('database', 'user', 'password')

% open cursor and issue SQL statement to select data

cursorA = exec(connectionA, 'select X from Y')

% retrieve R rows of data

cursorA = fetch(cursorA, R)

The SQL statement in the exec command can include a where clause to further define the data to be imported. The fetch statement can retrieve all data at once or a subset of the selected rows. This process takes only a few minutes and, can be automated if you save the commands in an M-file. Once the data is in MATLAB, you can view attributes of the imported data, as well as the data itself, and you can use all of the MATLAB commands to process the data.

Exporting your results is easy, too. Put the data to be exported into a cell array and define the database column names to which you will be writing. For example:

insert(connectionA, 'tablename', {'columnname'}, 'cell_array')

Instead of an insert command, which adds data, you can use an update command, which replaces data. With the update command, you can use a where clause to specify exactly which data to replace. There is also an option for requiring a commit command in order to write data.