Re: Can SQL*Loader read standard input?

Thomas Gaines <Thomas.Gaines_at_noaa.gov> wrote:
> Pat -

> That's a real interesting question. At first I thought of using
> named pipes, but my IPC background is pretty rusty right now,
> and I knew that I'd waste time just getting the things to work.
> I had thought that SQL*Loader
> would be unable to read from stdin because of the input file being
> specified in the control file. But it looks as though I am wrong.
> Doing
> a quickie search through Metalink, I run across bug 876007 that's
> advertised as fixed in version 8.1.6. Here, a user had difficulty on
> AIX doing what you want, but apparently not on other operating
> systems.

I looked at this. The example includes the line INFILE "-"
That makes sense, so I tried it. Apparently the specific bug has been fixed in 9i, but it still doesn't work the way I would like. It tries to interpret the first line of the input as a filename, which is disastrous, of course.

> I started doing the little test case described in the bug
> on my own test Win2000 server
> until I realized that I don't know how to pipe in Win2000. To
> test this on Unix would be a pain right now, and so I'll leave it
> to you to give a try on your end.

It's easy to make a named pipe on Linux, and it seems to work just fine. Thanks for the idea.

-- 
*   Patrick L. Nolan                                          *
*   W. W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory (HEPL)       * 
*   Stanford University                                       *