After digging up some more, I found out this library:
If you’ve used Apache POI in the past to read in Excel files, you probably noticed that it’s not very memory efficient. Reading in an entire workbook will cause a severe memory usage spike, which can wreak havoc on a server.
There are plenty of good reasons for why Apache has to read in the whole workbook, but most of them have to do with the fact that the library allows you to read and write with random addresses. If (and only if) you just want to read the contents of an Excel file in a fast and memory effecient way, you probably don’t need this ability. Unfortunately, the only thing in the POI library for reading a streaming workbook requires your code to use a SAX-like parser. All of the friendly classes like Row and Cell are missing from that API.
This library serves as a wrapper around that streaming API while preserving the syntax of the standard POI API. Read on to see if it’s right for you.
InputStream is = new FileInputStream(new File("/path/to/workbook.xlsx"));
StreamingReader reader = StreamingReader.builder()
.rowCacheSize(100) // number of rows to keep in memory (defaults to 10)
.bufferSize(4096) // buffer size to use when reading InputStream to file (defaults to 1024)
.sheetIndex(0) // index of sheet to use (defaults to 0)
.sheetName("sheet1") // name of sheet to use (overrides sheetIndex)
.read(is); // InputStream or File for XLSX file (required)
There is also SAX Event API, which reads the document and parse its contents through events.
If memory footprint is an issue, then for XSSF, you can get at the underlying XML data, and process it yourself. This is intended for intermediate developers who are willing to learn a little bit of low level structure of .xlsx files, and who are happy processing XML in java. Its relatively simple to use, but requires a basic understanding of the file structure. The advantage provided is that you can read a XLSX file with a relatively small memory footprint.