Best practice to export TV Guide to TXT / CSV files

Question

Dear All,
I have working TV Guide exporting to XML using Oracle 10g. Now I have a request to allow to export it to a TXT file delemeted by commas or tabs.
Thought using of External Tables will do the work, same as I import the data, but seems that I am wrong - it excepts only ORACLE_DATAPUMP type,
so the file can't be seen in a simple notepad / text editor.
What shall I do? Is there any documents I can read about?
Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

3360 wrote:
BluShadow wrote:
3360 wrote:
From 10g onwards you can write to external tables. I'd be glad to be proved wrong, I don't have 10g handy at the moment, but as I recall, you could only write to external tables in data pump format, which I think is some sort of binary wrapped xml format similar to export format, not plain text.Yes, my misunderstanding of the OP's post. (see above)
The dump file set is made up of one or more disk files that contain table data, database object metadata, and control information. The files are written in a proprietary, binary format, which can be read only by Data Pump Import.That's not strictly true. You can open them up in notepad/wordpad and clearly see the data in XML format. Ok, it's got some binary rubbish around it, but the data is clear.I think the quote from the manuals refers to systems that can read the file, rather than visually reading it on a screen. What is it with XML that people think 1) they can read it and therefore 2) computer programs must be able to read it too?I never said that. ;)
The issue was about being able to open it in notepad, not about a computer program being able to read it.
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Spooling generally seems the best option for writing plain text out of the database.Ewwww! not my best option. I prefer to keep things in the database rather than rely on external utilities like SQL*Plus. UTL_FILE generally does the job nicely.. otherwise write it all into a clob and use one of the various methods of writing out clobs to do it, but UTL_FILE is the simplest.Unless the stored procedure runs as a database job or schedule, something with an IO interface will be calling it. Compared to spooling UTL_FILE requires more code, is slower since it needs to loop and write a row at a time, can only write to the db server and needs directory objects, so it is both more complicated and limited.Spooling also has a nasty habit of adding an extra blank line on the end of the file. ;)