Reference list of Identifiers from external file (ie .txt file)

Question

Hello All,
I was hoping someone may be able to help me with a conceptual (and then technical...) line of thought?
I have a list of roughly 7000 loans to interrogate in an excel spreadheet or text file, is there a way I can get my query to reference this list, regard it as a temporary table and join it to an SQL query?
The list of loans are unique 8 digit identifiers. I have a very simple SQL query over two core tables that brings back the balance and currency for all loans on our system but I want to get these fields for the 7000 loans in question only.
I would normally just query all the loans and use a vlookup in Excel but the numbers are too big to make this viable.
The only method I currently have in place is to loop through the identifers one by one, querying each separately. Running the same query 7000 times seems rather inefficient!!
Is this a reasonable concept? If so I shall need some help with how to reference the external file, which will be gratefully received!!
Thank you :)
Jon

Answer 1

Hi Peter,
You're right this is ad-hoc, but this sort of situation arises all the time where I am given a list of identifiers to furnish with data, if I can figure out how to use external files it will be very useful. At least having some knid of work around would help.
Running
select *
from dba_sys_privs
where grantee = 'REPORTER'
order by privilegeGives me:
GRANTEE          PRIVILEGE          ADMIN_OPTION
REPORTER     ALTER SESSION          NO
REPORTER     CREATE CLUSTER          NO
REPORTER     CREATE DATABASE LINK     NO
REPORTER     CREATE SEQUENCE          NO
REPORTER     CREATE SESSION          NO
REPORTER     CREATE SYNONYM          NO
REPORTER     CREATE TABLE          NO
REPORTER     CREATE VIEW          NO
REPORTER     SELECT ANY DICTIONARY     NO
REPORTER     SELECT ANY TABLE     NO
REPORTER     UNLIMITED TABLESPACE     NOSo I don't have the rights for the external tables if I understand correctly? Directory creation for example. I do appear to be able to create tables though so perhaps I can greate a TEMP table under my REPORTER login and populate it on an ad-hoc basis as you suggest.
I'm stil wading through that document! I'm going to try to talk to someone in our IT department as well about the server side.
Thanks for the advice, will update asap.
Jon