Using SQLcl to load CSV to a table, without COLUMN HEADERS

I don’t have SQLcl yet, DOWNLOAD it!

Question from the ‘comments’ today:

I would like to have a parameter for dataload WITHOUT column names having to be in the 1st line.

Simply load the columns in the order they are in the txt/csv file.

Often delivered or generated txt files have no header information at all and you still know how to handle them (you know the target table AND the source file structures and that they must match.)

No joke, I really have such use cases and have (yet) to “construct” the first line (column names) by concat a “default” file and the data file. ugly…

a customer…

When I get these questions, I just love being able to say, “we can in fact to just that!”

Our TABLE

If we are going to load data, we’re going to need a table. Let’s build a quick-n-dirty copy of HR.EMPLOYEES.

CREATE TABLE emps_no_headers2
    AS
        SELECT
            employee_id,
            first_name,
            last_name,
            salary
        FROM
            employees
        WHERE
            1 = 2;

Our new table looks like this –

To load CSV, we’re going to need CSV. Let’s generate the CSV from our existing EMPLOYEES table.

Now the default behavior when using our command to load delimited data is to treat the first line of the incoming data as the list of COLUMN headers for the table, and use that to map which items in the data being streamed goes to which column in the table being populated by SQLcl.

The command is called LOAD.

LOAD has two sets of options:

• set loadformat – how the data being imported will be processed
• set load – what and how the load operation will actually take place

We want to tell SQLcl to NOT expect column headers in our CSV, so we’re going to use ‘set loadformat’.

Your Load Options

Hi friends in Europe! I know what you are thinking. You can change the delimiter(;) !

Want some help? Just ask for it…

Loading the table

Let’s do a trick! Let’s take a CSV and get DDL for it.

Maybe you don’t have a table yet, you JUST have a CSV file. And THIS CSV file does have column headers. Let’s see what SQLcl 21.3 can do with that.

So I have a CSV. And I WANT a table from that. I can use the GUI of course. But we’re DEVS, no mouse, no mouse!

We’ll scan the data, look for max column widths, date formats, etc, and rename columns that aren’t legal/valid for an Oracle schema. That ‘show_ddl’ bit is new for 21.3, and says, just show me what you WOULD do, without actually doing it.

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