Learning is not a spectator sport
Connor McDonald on SQL and the Oracle Database
Tag: external
External table preprocessor on Windows
There are plenty of blog posts about using the pre-processor facility in external tables to get OS level information available from inside the database. Here’s a simple example of getting a directory listing: run_os.bat ========== @echo off cd \oracle dir /b SQL> create table…
The death of UTL_FILE – part 2
I wrote a post a while back call “The Death of UTL_FILE”, and probably because of it’s click-bait title I got lots of feedback, so I’m back to flog that horse . Seriously though, I stand behind my assertion in that post, that the…
Parsing freeform data in flat files
SQL loader is a very cool utility that has existed for a long time within Oracle to load flat files into the database. However sometimes people find the control file syntax quite cryptic, and when it comes to passing very complicated structures, this can…
A new line on NEWLINE
Recently I was doing a simple external table load using a CSV file, but was getting an interesting error. My file looked simple enough “ID”,”EMAIL”,”TIMESTAMP”,”SUBJECT”,”STATUS”,”STATUS_TS” “2012348048”,”john@anon.com”,”05/02/2000″,”Subject 1″,”5″,”09/04/2007″ “2412348048”,”mike@anon.com”,”05/02/2000″,”Subject 1″,”5″,”09/16/2002″ “348543169051”,”sue@anon.com”,”03/10/2001″,”Subject 1″,”5″,”03/24/2008″ “348396029762”,”mary@anon.com”,”03/10/2001″,”Subject 1″,”5″,”03/10/2001″ “1212348047”,”sam@anon.com”,”05/02/2000″,”Subject 1″,”5″,”05/02/2000″ “1612348048”,”vincent@anon.com”,”05/02/2000″,”Subject 1,”5″,”06/02/2006″ … … So it should have been…
Slow external table access
We had an interesting issue on 12.1.0.1, where users were reporting very slow performance on queries to external tables. When I tried to replicate the problem, everything seemed just fine, so I initially reported back the familiar “Well, it works on my PC” 🙂…
