Need help in writing data to a flat file in .csv format

Question

Hi All,
could you please show with a sample example to write data in .csv format using UTL_file.
The result of the refcursor i want to write to a file in .csv format.
How can i achieve this.
Thx

Answer 1

Hi,
There are two ways to acheive this.
First and which I prefer is creating a SQL script which will generate csv file at the specified location in CSV format. And then this SQL script can be called from your cron job similar to how you call stored procedure. Following is pseudo code that can be used -
set linesize 500
set echo off
set feedback off
set prompt off
set pagesize 0
spool <name of the csv file>.csv
<Your select statement>;
spool offPut select statement delimiting columns you want to use with ','. E.g. following query should create a CSV file named as abc.csv with one record and 2 columns delimited by comma. First column is ENO and second column is ENAME.
set linesize 500
set echo off
set feedback off
set prompt off
set pagesize 0
spool abc.csv
select ENO || ',' || ENAME from employee;
spool offSecond, you can write a PLSQL procedure and then call this procedure from cron job. There is a generic procedure shared by BluShadow some time back which is a very good example for this. Please refer to following link for this solution -
REF Cursor creating CSV files
I will suggest to use first method above if possible since it will be faster and less complicated in my opinion. Second method is recommended for scenarios where select statement is created dynamically and cannot be written during development.
Hope this solves your purpose.
Cheers,
Anirudha