Re: External tables

> Or am I (as usual!) missing something here?

You are, indeed, missing something.

However, the problem is one of reading the typed word rather than hearing the spoken word. I am doing a presentation in a couple of weeks entitled:

    Will anything run on RAC ?

Now, I promise, when I gave the organiser the title my concept was:

    "Will __ANY__ product that you throw at RAC     run on it ?"

Unfortunately when I saw the advert I realised that the natural way to read the title was:

    "Is there the slightest chance of
    finding any product that will actually     be able to run on RAC".

To come back to your question - my point was that you have the option of specifying a bad file - which means that the user loses data without realising it because the only time the data is checked is at query run time and by then it's too late and there is simple mechanism for the query to say "this is the data I could read but I dumped some garbage as I was doing to"; OR you choose not to specify a bad file - which means the user's query crashes just when they really want to see the data.

Regards

Jonathan Lewis
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk

  The educated person is not the person
  who can answer the questions, but the
  person who can question the answers -- T. Schick Jr

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The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: 25 April 2003 17:17

> Jonathan
>
> Where are you getting the idea that the external table definition
doesn't
> allow bad data from? I can only assume you mean the particular
table you're
> thinking of is set up this way, because in general external table
> definitions DO allow a bad file. Or am I (as usual!) missing
something here?
> Here's an example cut straight from the doc - note the badfile line:
>

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Jonathan Lewis
  INET: jonathan_at_jlcomp.demon.co.uk

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