ExcelTable now supports delimited or positional text data sources. Though this addition provides a small subset of the features available with Oracle’s buit-in external tables, it is not meant to compete with them. External tables can only read data from external files. Through ExcelTable interface, we are now able to read text content already residing … Continue reading ExcelTable 4.0 : Flat File Support| Odie's Oracle Blog
I’m currently working on adding support for delimited and positional flat files to ExcelTable. The file, residing as a CLOB inside the database, will be parsed using PL/SQL code. In its simplest, the base algorithm consists in locating field separators (and line terminators) in the input text and extracting data in between. DBMS_LOB.INSTR API may … Continue reading PL/SQL CSV Parsing : To Buffer or Not Buffer| Odie's Oracle Blog
I don’t know – or remember – if this was ever qualified as a bug or an unimplemented feature, but starting with Oracle 18c, we are now able to make static references to pipelined table functions returning an ANYDATASET instance in PL/SQL. This enhancement comes together with the release of Polymorphic Table Functions (PTF) in … Continue reading Oracle 18c : PL/SQL support for pipelined table functions returning ANYDATASET| Odie's Oracle Blog
Here’s the latest addition to ExcelTable (v3.1). We are now able to specify default values when mapping columns using the DML API. This new feature has been implemented based on Jordan Cortes’ request last October. ExcelTable will apply the default value either in the usual way (i.e. when the input value is NULL), or as … Continue reading ExcelTable 3.1 : Default Value Feature in DML API| Odie's Oracle Blog
ExcelTable (v3.0) finally supports multi-sheet queries. I’ve implemented this new feature following Mike Kutz’s suggestion last year. Function getRows, as well as related routines getCursor and loadData are now overloaded to accept both a list of sheet names or a sheet name pattern (regular expression). In order to know which data come from which sheet, … Continue reading ExcelTable 3.0 : Multi-sheet support| Odie's Oracle Blog