Oracle in a Nutshell

Concatenation Clauses

Concatenation rules tell SQL*Loader to combine two or more records from the INFILE into a single row in the database. You can specify concatenation in two ways. The first way is with the CONCATENATE clause:

CONCATENATE record_number

where record_number indicates a fixed number of records in the INFILE. The second is with the CONTINUEIF clause.

The THIS keyword indicates that the continuation character is in the current record. The NEXT keyword indicates that the continuation character is in the next record, which will be concatenated to this record. The PRESERVE keyword indicates that the continuation character(s) are preserved in the data loaded. The PRESERVE keyword was new in Oracle8i. The remainder of the clause is used to identify the position and value of the continuation characters.

An alternative syntax for the CONTINUEIF clause for non-fixed length is:

CONTINUEIF LAST [(]{= | <>}{'char' | X'hex_digits'}[)]

which tells SQL*Loader to check the last character in the record for a continuation character. With this syntax, the continuation character is always preserved in the row.

If you use concatenation, the position information for the fields refers to the combined row.