sqlldr hanging on input from fifo

From: Kevin Murphy <murphy2_at_speakeasy.net>
Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 16:19:37 -0400
Message-ID: <Nr-dnVkgvpRGAAfd4p2dnA@speakeasy.net>

Using 9iR2 on Mac OS X 10.2.8, I'm trying to zcat a gzipped data file to a named pipe (fifo) and have sqlldr read the data from the fifo. When sqlldr is done reading the data, it just hangs, even though zcat has completed.

Here is what I'm doing:

mkfifo virtual.dat
zcat data.gz >virtual.dat &
sqlldr control=my.ctl user/pass

where my.ctl refers to virtual.dat.

This is the first time I've ever used named pipes, so I may be doing something wrong.

The ktrace (~strace) output (see below) shows that sqlldr in fact reads the entire file; then there's a long run of sigprocmask()'s, then sqlldr writes some binary data to some other file (not sure what it is; I can't see the open), then sqlldr waits forever trying to read the file, and no more input is forthcoming.

As a test, instead of sqlldr, I used cat to read the fifo, and that worked fine.

Here's an excerpt of the ktrace output:

  19071 sqlldr GIO fd 7 read 6308 bytes

        "26 23:24:00	2	9606	1	0
	10005	0.486878	0.07993		2000-09-19 17:02:00	2004-03-15 01:18:00	2	9606	1	11


...

	10093	0.330564	0.236663		2000-09-19 17:02:00	2004-03-15 01:18:00	1	9606	1	2
	10094	0.370968	0.218785		2000-09-19 17:02:00	2004-03-15 01:18:00	2	9606	1	2
	10095	0.267385	0.249395		2000-09-19 17:02:00	2004-03-15 01:18:00	1 
9606	1	31
	10096	0.382872	0.211766		2000-09-19 17:02:00	2004-03-15 01:18:00	1 
9606	1	11
	10097				2000-09-19 17:02:00	2002-10-26 23:24:00	2	9606	1	0
        "

  19071 sqlldr RET read 6308/0x18a4
  19071 sqlldr CALL read(0x7,0x59a8a4,0x5a75c)   19071 sqlldr GIO fd 7 read 0 bytes

        ""
  19071 sqlldr RET read 0
  19071 sqlldr CALL sigprocmask(0x1,0xbfff9e18,0xbfff9de0)   19071 sqlldr RET sigprocmask 0
  19071 sqlldr CALL sigprocmask(0x1,0xbfff9e18,0xbfff9de0)   19071 sqlldr RET sigprocmask 0
  19071 sqlldr CALL sigprocmask(0x1,0xbfff9e18,0xbfff9de0)
...

  19071 sqlldr GIO fd 8 wrote 512 bytes "\a\M-[\0\0\^F\0\0\0\0\0\^Qi\^R\0\^]\M-qt\0\0\0\^A\0\0\0\^B\^C\M^A\^S\0\0\0\^A\0)\M-`@\0\^CK\^_\0\0\0\M-H\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\M-?\M^?\M-'"<\0\

	/
	\^B\M-A\^D\^D\M-@\rQ0\^D\M-@\^VS&\M^?\axd 

\^S\^R\^C\^A\axh\^C\^O\^B\^S\^A\^B\M-A\^B\^C\M-Ba\a\^B\M-A\^B\^B\M-A\a<\0/
...

  19477 sqlldr RET read(0x7,0x4f50000,0x100000)

Thanks for any advice.

Kevin Murphy Received on Thu May 06 2004 - 15:19:37 CDT