CREATE TABLESPACE PROBLEM

Question

I'm unable to get sqlplus to recognize predefined Windows environment variables. For example:
CREATE TABLESPACE PRODUCT DATAFILE '%ORACLE_DIR%\oradata\xxx\PRODUCT.DAT' SIZE 1M AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 1M;
%ORACLE_DIR% = C:\bas\db\oracle
After trying to execute this statement the following error gets returned:
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01119: error in creating database file
'BAS_ORACLE_HOME\oradata\bas\PRODUCT.DAT'
ORA-27040: skgfrcre: create error, unable to create file
OSD-04002: unable to open file
O/S-Error: (OS 3) The system cannot find the path specified.
However, when I enter the command as:
CREATE TABLESPACE PRODUCT DATAFILE 'C:\bas\db\oracle\oradata\xxx\PRODUCT.DAT' SIZE 1M AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 1M;
The tablespace gets completed successfully.
Therefore, how do I get the CREATE TABLESPACE statement to recognize ORACLE_DIR?
Thank you in advance for your help!

Answer 1

I sometimes pass in filenames as parameters to SQL*Plus
and then use the argument substitution variables.
For example:
sqlplus system/manager @myscript.sql c:\mydir\myfile
Where myscript.sql contains
create .... datafile '&1' ...
Another common solution is to construct the script
in a shell environment that does the the OS variable
expansion before the script is passed to SQL*Plus.
Typically this is with a "here document". In Perl
it would be something like:
sqlplus -s <<EOF;
system/manager
create ... datafile $ENV{'ORACLE_DIR'} ...
exit
EOF
-- C