External Tables - Oracle 10g/11g Data and Database Management Utilities - page 79

Protocol
1. PROTOCOL : Indicates the used to perform the connection; this will be TCP

most of the times.

2. HOST : This is the client's IP Address.

3. PORT : The port number of the oracle server used to establish the connection.

Mapping XML files as External Tables
XML has become a de facto information exchange format, which is why oracle has
included the XML Database ( XDB) feature from 9.2.0. However, it requires the
data to be actually loaded into the database before it can be processed. An External
Table allows the user to take a quick look at the contents of the external file prior to
performing any further processing.

In this example an External Table is created out of an XML file. This file is read by
means of a CLOB field, and some further XDB commands can be issued against the
external XML file to extract and view data.

Let's create the external XML file first:

create table EMPLOYEES_XML (xmlFile CLOB)
organization external (
type ORACLE_LOADER
default directory EXTTABDIR
access parameters (
fields (xmllob char terminated by ',')
column transforms (xmlFile from lobfile(xmllob))
)
location('employees.dat')
)
reject limit unlimited;

The employees.dat file contains the file name of the XML file to load as an
external CLOB file. This file, for the purpose of the demo, contains the file name:
employees.xml .