Re: Can the Oracle DB access the file system?

"contrapositive" <nosp_at_m.com> wrote in
news:H6Nw7.101$cu1.123821_at_newsrump.sjc.telocity.net:

> I know Oracle fairly well, but not much about the platform or
> environment that hosts our Oracle 8i database. It's an HP UNIX server
> of some sort. I've been asked to investigate if it is possible for
> database programs to call (i.e. execute) UNIX shell scripts. I thought
> there was a package that allowed the database access to the file
> system. Can anyone elaborate? Is this a possibility? The idea is that
> we have the job scheduler kick off a job that runs every night; that
> job would be a procedure that just executes a shell script and then
> determines whether the script succeeded or failed.
>
> Does any of this sound feasible? What's required? Thanks in advance.
>
> --jk
>
>
>

UTL_FILE allows Oracle to read/write Unix files, but this does NOT appear to be what you desire.

8i supports "external procedures" where Oracle can invoke code that resides in operating systems DLLs or *.so files.

There is a 3 - 5 page NOTE on Metalink that describes wrapping a JAVA procedure inside of PL/SQL which will execute at the OS level the command string passed into it. I had this going in less than 30 minutes.

HTH & YMMV! Received on Tue Oct 09 2001 - 20:20:38 CDT