On 19 Jan 2010, at 12:16, Jayadevan M wrote:
> Yes. We get quite a few files as 'feeds' from external systems. Once the files are in our network, we know that no
changeswill happen to those files. We access them using Oracle external tables and process them (the data, after some
processing,end up in other real tables). If external tables were not there, we would have had to schedule some job to
loadthese files.
I'm surprised you even need to download them to your network. I suspect it would be quite possible to implement
'externaltables' so that they could be read from eg. an RSS feed. That would be a pretty slick feature.
There's a gazillion number of data formats that people would want support for though; CSV, probably excel, RSS feeds,
webservices, etc.
Most of that should probably be implemented by means of stored procedures (using the unsafe languages - pl/pythonu,
pl/perlu,etc) returning TABLE (...), which means this is in fact already possible I think? It's just that nobody's
(publicly)thought of doing this so far.
Alban Hertroys
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