Managing data with External Tables is a means not only for mapping external flat files as regular but limited tables inside the database but also a tool to more efficiently perform administrative tasks such as programmatically processing database log files such as the alert.log or the listener.log files. It can be used to easily view external...
When managing External Tables there should be an easy way to redefine the external source file. It is enough to change the External Table properties by means of an ALTER TABLE command. Let s create a stored procedure that performs this task by means of a dynamically generated DDL command. This procedure named Change_External_Table redefines...
In the previous example a 10g data pump generated an External Table that was transparently read by the 11g release. Let s create an 11g data pump External Table named DP_DEPARTMENTS geshibot language oracle" create table dp_departments organization external type oracle_datapump default...
Does your database seem complicated Are you finding it difficult to work with it efficiently Database administration is part of a daily routine for all database professionals. Using Oracle Utilities administrators can benefit from improved maintenance windows optimized backups faster data transfers and more reliable security and can in general...
XML has become a de facto information exchange format which is why oracle has included the XML Database XDB feature from 9.2.0. However it requires the data to be actually loaded into the database before it can be processed. An External Table allows the user to take a quick look at the contents of the external file prior to performing any further...
One particular extension of the above procedure is to read the listener.log file. This file has a specific star-delimited field file format which can be advantageous and eases the read by means of the Loader driver. The file format is as follows geshibot language oracle" 21-JUL-2008 00 39 50 CONNECT_DATA SID beta CID PROGRAM perl HOS...
Extending the alert.log analysis with External Tables Reading the alert.log from the database is a useful feature which can help you to find any outstanding error messages reported in this file. geshibot language oracle" create table ALERT_LOG text_line varchar2 512 organization external...
One of the main uses of the External Tables is their support of the ETL process allowing the user to perform a data load that is transformed to the target format without an intermediate stage table. Let s read an External Table whose contents are This data can be loaded in a single command to multiple tables. Let s create several tables...
The driver used to unload data to an External Table is the ORACLE_DATAPUMP access driver. It dumps the contents of a table in a binary proprietary format file. This way you can exchange data with other 10g and higher databases in a preformatted way to meet the other database s requirements. Unloading data to an External Table doesn t make it updateable...
To further illustrate the tight relationship between SQL Loader and External Tables the SQL Loader tool may be used to generate a script that creates an External Table according to a pre-existing control file. SQL Loader has a command line option named EXTERNAL_TABLE this can hold one of three different parameters NOT_USED GENERATE_ONLY...
The create table command syntax is just like any other regular table creation A B up to the point where the ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL C keyword appears this is the point where the actual External Table definition starts. Here is the source code of the External Table creation. In this case the External Table is accessed by the ORACLE_LOADER...
Let s setup the environment Let s create the demonstration user and prepare its environment to create an External Table. The example that will be developed first refers to the External Table using the ORACLE_LOADER driver.  geshibot language oracle create user EXTTABDEMO identified by ORACLE default tablespace USERS;...
When working in data warehouse environments the Extraction--Transformation--Loading ETL cycle frequently requires the user to load information from external sources in plain file format or perform data transfers among Oracle database in a proprietary format. This requires the user to create control files to perform the load. As the format of...
Summary In this chapter we learned everything we need to do to get ready for our Forms to APEX conversion project. Here are the necessary steps we went through before we started We have seen what files we need. These are the.FMB Forms Modules .OLB Object Libraries .MMB Menu Modules .PLL PL SQL Libraries and RDF REX or JSP...
In order to convert your Forms applications to APEX we also need the database model on our target area. Using Oracle s SQL Developer we will be able to do both an export and an import on the database of the database objects we need in our application. In Chapter 1 we talked about the objects we needed in the application we are converting. The import...
If we take a look inside the XML files we just created we will notice a few things. I use SQL Developer of Oracle to look inside the XML files we just created. It s a free tool that we will need for several other tasks during our Conversion project and it does the job. But of course you can use a different XML editor to examine the XML files. When...
To convert PL SQL Libraries to an XML format it s easiest to use the convert command that comes with the Report Builder. With this command called rwconverter we define the source type call the source and define the destination type and the destination. In this way we have control over the way we need to convert the original .pll file to a .pld...
In our example we will convert the Customers Report from a RDF file to an XML file. To do this we follow the steps given here 1. We need to open the Employees.rdf file with Reports Builder. 2. Open Reports Builder from your Start menu. If Reports Builder is opened we need to cancel the wizard that asks us if we want to create a new report. 3....
To convert the .FMB .OLB and .MMB files to XML we need to do the following steps in the command prompt Forms Modules The following steps are done in order to convert the .FMB file to XML 1. We will change the working directory to the directory that has the FMB file.  In my example I have stored all the files in a directory called summit...
Creating XML files To create XML files we need three parts of the Oracle Developer Suite. All of these parts come with a normal 10g or 9i installation of the Developer Suite. These three parts are the Forms Builder the Reports Builder and the Forms2XML conversion tool. The Forms2XML conversion tool is the most extensive to understand and is...