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@(protected)
Sent:  Wed 8/25/2004 6:22 PM
To:  oracle-l@(protected)
Cc:=09
Subject:  OT: External table novelties
Dear list,

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
----------------------------------------------------------------
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@(protected)
put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line.
--
Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/
FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------


----------------------------------------------------------------
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@(protected)
put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line.
--
Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/
FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------