UTL_FILE.FOPEN ... INVALID_PATH exception problem

From: Walter Dnes <waltdnes_at_interlog.com>
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 1999 06:08:39 GMT
Message-ID: <36c02d7f.6587532@news.interlog.com>

  Having finally gotten Client 8 up and running on my home PC (Windows 98) and PLUS80W.EXE connecting to our beta database at work, I finally got a chance to try out UTL_FILE. (Our production database/client is 7.1; DBMS_OUTPUT simply doesn't cut the mustard for one particular potentialy-multi-megabyte data extractor utility I'm working on). So far I've gotten nowhere, because I always run into the INVALID_PATH exception ('File location or filename was invalid'). Here's a sample of the code that dies. I actually want to write to D:\SQLQUERY\EXTRACT.TXT, but I can't even get the following to work...

  SET SERVEROUTPUT ON;
  SET TERMOUT ON;
DECLARE
  FILEHANDLE UTL_FILE.FILE_TYPE;
-- BLAH...;

• BLAH...;
• BLAH...;

BEGIN
  DBMS_OUTPUT.ENABLE(1000000);
  DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('Checkpoint Alpha');   FILEHANDLE := UTL_FILE.FOPEN('D:\', 'EXTRACT.TXT', 'W');   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('Checkpoint Bravo');

  It spits out 'Checkpoint Alpha', followed by the error message that my INVALID_PATH exception-handler writes, so I know it's running into problems with the FOPEN function.

  Since this is a local drive on my PC, I assume that INIT.ORA is not required. For security and performance reasons, our system people do *NOT* want a bunch of end-users writing files (even to their own accounts) on the database server machine, so this has to go to my local machine. What am I doing wrong?

  BTW, Is there another newsgroup (or mailing list) that focuses on PL/SQL programming? That's going to be where I will deal most with Oracle for the forseeable future.

Walter Dnes <waltdnes_at_interlog.com> procmail spamfilter http://www.interlog.com/~waltdnes/spamdunk/spamdunk.htm Received on Sun Feb 07 1999 - 00:08:39 CST