What is an external table?

July 18th, 2009 by uCertify Leave a reply »

An external table is a read-only table stored outside a database in flat files. The metadata for an external table is not created at the time of table creation. However, the CREATE TABLE statement is used to create metadata. External tables are used to load and unload Oracle data as flat files. The following can be used to query data stored in an external table:

  • SQL statements
  • PL/SQL
  • JAVA

Indexes cannot be created for an external table. The following are the two types of access drivers provided by an Oracle server for an external table:

  • ORACLE_LOADER (Loader access driver): It is used to read data from external files by using Oracle Loader technology. The data format should be interpreted by SQL*Loader utility.
  • ORACLE_INTERNAL (Import/export access driver): It is used to import and export data. The import and export operations are platform independent.
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