Loading data from a CLOB Parameter

Question

Hi,
we have a front end app, in .NET, that passes a file has a CLOB Parameter to an Oracle procedure. What is the beast way to load the content of the CLOB Parameter into an Oracle table? Can SQL LDR be used in this case? If not, how about the UTL FILE utility?
Thanks in advance,
Marc

Answer 1

LAF wrote:
we have a front end app, in .NET, that passes a file has a CLOB Parameter to an Oracle procedure. What is the beast way to load the content of the CLOB Parameter into an Oracle table? Can SQL LDR be used in this case? If not, how about the UTL FILE utility?Both of these, SQL*Loader and UTL_FILE, works on external files in an o/s file system. The CLOB is a column value in a row in a database table.
If the CLOB is XML for example, that can be directly parsed into a XML DOM in Oracle. Other formats require one of two basic approaches.
Write a parser in PL/SQL to read the CLOB line by line, tokenise and parse it, and transform it into whatever structured output required. A pipe line table function can be used for this approach, allowing the process and transformation PL/SQL function to be treated as if it is a SQL table that SQL select can be used against.
The 2nd option is to unload the CLOB into an actual external o/s file and running whatever process against it to read, parse and process the file.
The basic approach that suits the requirement the best, depends entirely on the requirement itself.