| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
 |
 | |||
| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
|
| |||
Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: External table novelties
Jared,
I have not thoroughly tested this, but the basic premise does work and =
is
valid. Create an external table that's defined on a named pipe, rather
than a file. I was half expecting an ORA-600 ora ORA-7445, but Oracle=20
(9.2.0.5 on Solaris 8) seems ok with it. I just did basic testing.
select * from my_pipe;
will immediately return any data in the pipe, or block waiting on data.
If you send multiple lines of output to the pipe, all the lines will=20
be outputted in Oracle.
Basically, external table works exactly like the named pipe does at the=20 O/S level.
Now, the really creative part is figuring out what exactly you could do =
with
this.....I haven't given that a lot of thought just yet. Of course, you =
could write a small JAVA proc that could execute any arbitrary O/S =
command=20
and pull the results into Oracle. Perhaps pull O/S in data about O/S=20
performance metrics, etc.....I don't know, I'm sure folks will come up
w/ creative ideas, but at the moment it's 3:11am, and I'm not feeling=20
creative.....;-)
-Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org on behalf of Jared Still Sent: Wed 8/25/2004 6:22 PM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org Cc:=09 Subject: OT: External table novelties
Due to a presentation I have promised to give, I am gathering ideas=20 on novel uses for external tables. =20
I already have 2 good examples to work with, but it would be nice to have some more to work with. =20
What I already have:
Using external tables to muck about with the alert.log and trace files.
See http://www.dbazine.com/still1.shtml if interested in that.
Along similar lines is using external tables to read trace files. =
There's
a bit of a twist to that one though, as the trace files have extra =
markers
in them, and the SQL to query them uses analytic functions to group
the data.
So, any other novel uses I should consider?
Thanks,
Jared
 |
 |