| Title: | DEC Rdb against the World |
| Moderator: | HERON::GODFRIND |
| Created: | Fri Jun 12 1987 |
| Last Modified: | Thu Feb 23 1995 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 1348 |
| Total number of notes: | 5438 |
Hi,
I have a customer that is considering Oracle for their Relational
Database. Apparently, one of their main requirements is to be able to
read randomly structured data into their database. In other
words the file is not structured into simple tables that would be
read into relations.
The most obvious way to handle this would be to write a program that
would understand how to read the file and would also know how to write
to the database.
It looks like someone (I persume Oracle) has convinced them that some
kind of 4GL exists that can be easily configured to read really strange
file formats and layouts. Such a system (if one exists) would have to
have some sort of conditional expressions, for example if you find a 2
in column 3 store the next 20 characters in table A if you see a 4 in
column 3 store the next 20 characters in table C etc.
Does anyone know if Oracle has such a 4GL?
Thanks and regards,
Peter Lamb
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 569.1 | Not in 3GL code | MAIL::DUNCANG | Gerry Duncan @KCO - DTN 452-3445 | Fri Feb 16 1990 14:11 | 12 |
Sounds like a custom approach to me. Oracle (and Ingres)
do have the ability to do positional parsing within a column. For
example, you can say, give me postions 2-5 from column x. Now, In the
case or Oracle, I believe this is a SQL*plus command and as such, is
probably only available to Oracle's SQL*forms and SQL*report and NOT
available with a 3GL program.
Personally, I would question the use a database in general if the
customer wants to handle his data this way. Seems like they're
defeating the purpose of using a database. But heck, what do I know ?
-- gerry
| |||||
| 569.2 | VAX Scan? | PHLACT::QUINN | Sat Feb 17 1990 00:19 | 13 | |
Part way?
Have you looked at VAX SCAN?
It is a text conversion language the lets you do things like,
"if this is a cntl J followed by a <cr><lf>, put the next six
characters in a fixed length record, etc."
that may get you part of the way.
thomas
| |||||
| 569.3 | Sounds like a winner | MUTTON::LAMB | Peter Lamb - FSG Santa Clara | Sat Feb 17 1990 00:32 | 7 |
Thanks for the suggestion of VAXscan that sounds pretty close to
what they are looking for except, from your reply it doesn't sound
like it can write directly to RDB.
Has anyone heard of something like this for Oracle?
Peter
| |||||
| 569.4 | call SQL module language | MAIL::DUNCANG | Gerry Duncan @KCO - DTN 452-3445 | Mon Feb 19 1990 04:58 | 2 |
VAXscan could probably call the SQL module language.
| |||||