External tables using datapump interface can be an alternative and supposed to be faster than simple reads since you can expose the flat file as a table as well. Raj On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 7:25 AM, John Dunn <JDunn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Apart from re-writing pl/sql to java, what are the alternatives to > utl_file that I can use in PL/SQL to read and write files? > > Oracle version is 10.2 > > >