Automating Excel is a very useful way to solve the kind of problem you describe, but I too would be wary of doing it from within SQL Server. For example if something goes wrong, how can you be sure never to leave an instance of Excel running in the background?

I have found it useful to automate Excel from scripts - in my case mainly VBS. You will find that you can use much the same Excel code as you are doing already, and you could access the database using ADODB connection, recordset and command objects and many more.

If you are into Powershell then you could use the .NET objects instead to access the database and benefit from much better error handling as well.