Jared, I have not thoroughly tested this, but the basic premise does work and = is valid. Create an external table that's defined on a named pipe, rather than a file. I was half expecting an ORA-600 ora ORA-7445, but Oracle=20 (9.2.0.5 on Solaris 8) seems ok with it. I just did basic testing. select * from my_pipe; will immediately return any data in the pipe, or block waiting on data. If you send multiple lines of output to the pipe, all the lines will=20 be outputted in Oracle. Basically, external table works exactly like the named pipe does at the=20 O/S level. Now, the really creative part is figuring out what exactly you could do = with this.....I haven't given that a lot of thought just yet. Of course, you = could write a small JAVA proc that could execute any arbitrary O/S = command=20 and pull the results into Oracle. Perhaps pull O/S in data about O/S=20 performance metrics, etc.....I don't know, I'm sure folks will come up w/ creative ideas, but at the moment it's 3:11am, and I'm not feeling=20 creative.....;-) -Mark -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Jared Still Sent: Wed 8/25/2004 6:22 PM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc:=09 Subject: OT: External table novelties Dear list, Due to a presentation I have promised to give, I am gathering ideas=20 on novel uses for external tables. =20 I already have 2 good examples to work with, but it would be nice to have some more to work with. =20 What I already have: Using external tables to muck about with the alert.log and trace files. See http://www.dbazine.com/still1.shtml if interested in that. Along similar lines is using external tables to read trace files. = There's a bit of a twist to that one though, as the trace files have extra = markers in them, and the SQL to query them uses analytic functions to group the data. So, any other novel uses I should consider? Thanks, Jared ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------