Gregory,
On doing some research, found that a number column can be populated with a 0
using the direct load path, if the input value is null by having the
following line in the control file:
field1 integer external defaultif (field1 = 'NULL')
But the same thing doesn't work for char columns. So you are right!
Prakash
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Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 11:20 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Thanx to Witold and Prakash for suggesting NULLIF and DEFAULTIF.
Unfortunately, it looks like both of those do basically the opposite of
what I'm trying to accomplish. Essentially, I want to prevent
sql*loader from ever inserting NULL in a column (which may not be
numeric), substituting whatever value is appropriate for the given
application instead. Something like using "nvl(:field,'unknown')" in
the field specification of the control file for conventional path loads.
As far as I can see, there's no way to do this within sql*loader
itself. So the choices would be to run a cleanup just after the load
(which may or may not negate the speed benefits of using direct path),
or to somehow pre-process the data file to fill in the missing values
(perhaps an awk or perl script). Of course, if I'm missing something
obvious please let me know... the sql*loader documentation seems
designed to confuse. (-:
Cheers!
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Author: Bala, Prakash
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