Importing and Exporting Data from Foreign Sources

The INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements are extremely useful from within a database program. They are used with the SELECT statement to provide the foundation for all other database operations you will perform. However, SQL as a language does not have a way to import or export data from foreign data sources.

For example, assume that your office may have been using a dBASE application for several years that has outgrown itself. Now your manager wants to convert this application to a client/server application using the Oracle relational DBMS (RDBMS). Unfortunately for you, these dBASE files contain thousands of records that must be converted to an Oracle database. Obviously, the INSERT, UPDATE ...

Get Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.