October 1996
Intermediate to advanced
687 pages
16h 41m
English
Content preview from Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages
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Chapter 13. PLVfile: Reading and Writing Operating System Files
The PLVfile (PL/Vision FILE package) provides a layer of code around the builtin UTL_FILE package (which is available only with Release 2.3 of PL/SQL and beyond). UTL_FILE allows you to read from and write to operating system files on the same machine in which the database instance is running. The ability to read and write operating system files has been a long-standing request ("desperate plea" would, perhaps, be a better description) of PL/SQL developers.
The PLVfile package provides a number of high-level programs, such as fcopy to copy files, and infile, a file-oriented version of INSTR, to make it easier for PL/SQL developers to take advantage of this very useful builtin package.
This chapter show how to use each of the different elements of the PLVfile package.