Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mandrill!hal!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: File data imported into SQL db's
Message-ID: <8190@ncoast.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jun 88 22:31:20 GMT
References: <236@tijc02.UUCP> <11410001@hpsmtc1.HP.COM> <3102@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.databases
Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh
Lines: 35

As quoted from <3102@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM> by sytek@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM (Mike Ewan):
+---------------
| In article <11410001@hpsmtc1.HP.COM> donovan@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (Donovan Hsieh) writes:
| >In the article, David Marks  writes :
| >>I have heard that some SQL databases can import fields from a file
| >>into attributes of relations. ...
| >
| >I believe that many SQL based database provide such kind of import/export
| >capabilities between external files and their database relations. HPSQL, a
| >SQL based relational database from Hewlett-Packard provides LOAD & UNLOAD ...
| 
| UNIFY also has this capability.  They call it INSERT or UPDATE.  The syntax
+---------------

It is also available as an external program, DBLOAD (in fact, the SQL
"insert" command is just an interface to DBLOAD).  And using the "lines 0"
command and SELECT ... INTO will perform the unload operation.

Informix-SQL also has LOAD and UNLOAD statements, which derive from Informix
3.x's LOAD ASCII / UNLOAD ASCII, plus an external "dbload" program.  But
these require that you turn on transaction logging even when it's acceptable
to do a "tar" backup of the database every day.  I consider this a
misfeature, especially since there's no way to turn it off once it's on (I
once accomplished it by manually updating informix.systables, but it was a
nightmare).  Oracle has an (extra cost) utility that does the same thing,
although I found writing a simple (load complete table) loader to be
trivial.  (Insofar as the fixed-record-size-oriented PCC is "trivial" to use
under Unix.  Boo, hiss! -- they should use arbitrary-length lines in PCC
rather than forcing me to check to see if I went beyond column 80 and
including an option if I did -- and G*d help me if I went beyond column
132.  [--uh, get off the soapbox, Brandon. . . .])
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery			  | "Given its constituency, the only
uunet!marque,sun!mandrill}!ncoast!allbery | thing I expect to be "open" about
Delphi: ALLBERY	       MCI Mail: BALLBERY | [the Open Software Foundation] is
comp.sources.misc: ncoast!sources-misc    | its mouth."  --John Gilmore