External table

From Oracle FAQ

An external table is a table that is not stored in an Oracle database. Data gets loaded via an access driver (normally ORACLE_LOADER) when the table is accessed. One can think of an external table as a view that allows running SQL queries against external data without requiring that the data first be loaded into the database.

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Example

CREATE TABLE t1 
( c1 NUMBER,
  c2 VARCHAR2(30)
)
ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL
( default directory my_data_dir
  access parameters
  ( records delimited by newline
    fields terminated by ','
  )
  location ('report.csv')  
);

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