External Table Symlink

[edvedafi]

I have an external table that is working. However in my application I am copying serveral GB worth of data files into the load directory then running a select /*+ append */ to insert the files into a table. Everything works well except it takes a long time to copy these files into the load directory. Previously we were using sqlloader and could dynamically write the control file with the directory in it so we did not have to copy the files at all. The actual load is much faster, but with the copy the total time is longer. We are running RedHat ES 3.0 with Oracle 10g. We thought rather than copying the files we would just symlink to them, but Oracle gives and error when we do this(actual message below) saying that it does not have permission to the directory. On a RedHat AS 3.0 box with Oracle 9i we are running exact same script with symlinks and everything is fine. Is there some reason that this does not work in 10g, or what am I missing here?

Thanks for you help,

Jason

ORA-29913: error in executing ODCIEXTTABLEFETCH callout
ORA-29400: data cartridge error
KUP-04001: error opening file /data/test.seq
ORA-06512: at "SYS.ORACLE_LOADER", line 52

 

[edvedafi]

An interesting side note is that after some more testing I discovered that if I do the symlink for the folder instead of the file it works. However this still does not give me a workable solution because I want my logs and other files to stay where they are not go into the directory where the orginal file is.

Thanks,

Jason