Text Importer

[gulhaugen]

For us, the text importer lacks one thing before it is really useful and elegant.

1. The ability to suggest column names(either field_1,field_2 etc, or the string in the first row of each column).
2. The ability to generate the create table script based on the mapping defined.

 

[Marco Kalter]

I have added this to the list of enhancement requests.

 

[aotte]

I don;t know whether this ever made it to the enhancement list, but the text importer would increase its value for me, if it could support external table definition generation.

 

[Stew Stryker]

Arnoud,

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you want to be able define a table external to Oracle, or you want to be able to create a new table within Oracle that uses the importer file definition?

I could really use the latter, though not the former.

 

[aotte]

I'm not sure whether we are talking about the same thing. Here's an excerpt form one of the Oracle manuals, as to what I mean by an external table.

External Tables

Another approach for handling external data sources is using external tables. Oracle9i`s external table feature enables you to use external data as a virtual table that can be queried and joined directly and in parallel without requiring the external data to be first loaded in the database. You can then use SQL, PL/SQL, and Java to access the external data.

I meant for the interface of the text importer to be leveraged to create an external table definition that Oracle can use.

We deal with a fairly large number of small flat files provided directly by users that need to load on a regular basis.

Of course, getting the table within Oracle is also a nice feature that I wouldn't want to miss out on, but that requires a manual effort to load it when the data has changed, versus a one-time definition effort.

 

[Stew Stryker]

Arnoud,

We were talking about the same thing. It's just that our DBAs don't allow us to use that feature, so I haven't had chance to see the value of what you were proposing.

But it sounds as if our needs aren't that different. You want Developer to build a script to define an Oracle external table that maps to the Text Importer file. I want it to create a script to define an internal Oracle table. The syntax is a little different, but not much, right?

 

[aotte]

Right! Except that I am greedy, so I want both.