FWIW, we load about 140 million records (not so many columns) via SQL*Loader every couple of weeks (on Oracle 9.2.0.6, Solaris). It takes an hour or two to perform the SQL*Loader portion of this job. I haven't actually tried UTL_FILE loads for this many records, but extrapolating from our experience with loads of < 1 million rows, I'd expect that UTL_FILE would take an order of magnitude longer than SQL*Loader. Also, IIRC, you'd be likely to run into some limitations with UTL_FILE on 8i. I'm not positive, but I think the line-size limitation was 1023 bytes back then? So... Given a choice, and assuming the input file is in a relatively sane format and you need to do relatively little manipulation to the data on the way in, I'd be very inclined to try SQL*Loader. Hope this helps -- Tim On 6/14/07, Ram Srinivasan <srinivasanram2004@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
All: Is SQLLDR faster or UTL_FILE utility faster? For loads of 130 million rows with about 200 columns, which tool is better? We are on 8.1.7 on Sun server. Thanks for your input. -- Sincerely Ram Srinivasan Charlottesville, VA.