By the way its Tanel Poder’s trick which i was trying to simulate it.

Since there’s no mechanical reason why it shouldn’t be possible, I think the answer has to be that the code has been fixed to avoid that possibility. (I tried to create a pipe with the name of a trace file that had not yet been opened, but when I enabled tracing (dbms_monitor call) the session didn’t try to write to the pipe. I suppose I could try using truss (or tusc, or some such) to see exactly what the session did – but I’d rather just suggest that Oracle doesn’t allow you to trace to a file because the session would have to stop and wait for another process to read from the pipe all the time, and this might cause problems.

I think Tanel Poder once demonstrated a cunning trick where he managed to get the trace file written to the screen as he ran some SQL – but I don’t remember how he did it, or even what platform he was running on at the time. (You could try searching his blog.)

It’s a general purpose bit of padding that I use to create rows of a reasonable size. It’s just an attempt to avoid extreme boundary conditions of very short rows in some of my tests.

I did a Google search for “mknod for windows” and the first hit was “CoreUtils for Windows” http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.hten't which claimed to have all you need.
I haven’t tried it though.

(I haven’t been watching the moon display – I may delete it soon.)

This option exists simply to tell Oracle that it can physically build an index in order as the data arrives, but the raw data from external tables never ends up in the database, so never needs to be indexed, so the feature doesn’t apply.

There is an option with sqlldr, though to turn a control file into an external table definition (sqlldr … external_table = generate_only) so I ran through a little test with my control file to see what would happen:

[jonathan@linux01 working]$  sqlldr userid=test_user/test control=iot_load data=/tmp/iot_load.dat external_table=generate_only

Gradually hacking my way through the control file, I got the following errors:

SQL*Loader-144: Conflicting load methods: direct=true/external_table=generate_only specified.
SQL*Loader-268: UNRECOVERABLE keyword may be used only in direct path.
SQL*Loader-256: SORTED INDEXES option allowed only for direct path

-Yasser

MS seems to have examples of named pipes, but it seems obsolete: https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2243304

Thanks,

Incidentally, and off topic, I note your ‘Curent Moon’ status is behind. If you pop your head out of the window you’ll see it’s a full moon today!