Consider John Q. Nerd with his bona fide SQL expertise and MIT PhD. How
much useful work can John get out of Oracle? None. John Q. Nerd only
knows how to drive Oracle from SQL*Plus. This appendix covers the
little details such as getting data into or out of Oracle. It is
organized as an FAQ.
How do I get data into Oracle?
Answer 1: Start up SQL*Plus. Type really fast.
Answer 2: If you need to load 1000+ rows per second, a fairly common
requirement in the data warehousing world, read the Oracle8 Server
Utilities, SQL*Loader section.
Answer 3: If SQL*Loader makes you feel like ripping out what's left
of your hair, go with Perl DBD/DBI (a module available from
http://www.cpan.org; explanation
available in Advanced
Perl Programming (Srinivasan 1997; O'Reilly).
Answer 4: If your data are imprisoned in another RDBMS, consider
using a fancy GUI tool such as Data Junction (http://www.datajunction.com).
These are PC-based applications that open simultaneous connections to
your Oracle database and some other RDBMS. They can generally show
you what's available in the other database and drag whatever you think
necessary into Oracle.
Answer 6: If your data are coming in from an email message,
configure your mailer to fork a Perl DBD/DBI script that will then parse
out the content from the headers and other such crud, open up Oracle,
and then send an insert statement. Due to the fork and the opening of
Oracle, this is 1/100th the efficiency of a Web script running in a
threaded Web server with database connection pooling. However, you
probably won't be getting 40 email messages per second so it doesn't
really matter. The old open-source ArsDigita Community System includes
a Perl script that you could use as a starting point.
See http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/software/acs-3.4.10.tar.tgz
for details.
