The ORACLE_LOADER access driver provides a set of access parameters unique to external tables of the type ORACLE_LOADER.
You can use the access parameters to modify the default behavior of the access driver. The information you provide through the access driver ensures that data from the data source is processed so that it matches the definition of the external table.
To use the external table management features that the ORACLE_LOADER access parameters provide, you must have some knowledge of the file format and record format (including character sets and field data types) of the data files on your platform. You must also know enough about SQL to be able to create an external table, and to perform queries against it.
You can find it helpful to use the EXTERNAL_TABLE=GENERATE_ONLY parameter in SQLLoader to obtain the proper access parameters for a given SQLLoader control file. When you specify GENERATE_ONLY, all the SQL statements needed to do the load using external tables, as
described in the control file, are placed in the SQLLoader log file. You can edit and customize these SQL statements. You can perform the actual load later without the use of SQLLoader by executing these statements in SQL*Plus.
