Text table advantages and disadvantages

[jjohnn]

I have need of a "read-only" set of tables, built from text files on the order of 10GB total.

Other than the inability to perform DML on them, are there disadvantages to using Text Tables (i.e. is there is speed hit in queries)?

 

[SantaMufasa]

Yes, John, queries against external tables ("text tables" as you called them) run slower: there are no indexes, traversing/access algorithms (by definition) are slower, et cetera. But if you factor in costs for loading the data into traditional tables and storage costs for certainly a lot more disk than 10GB, you may have a decent trade off.

Mufasa
(aka Dave of Sandy, Utah, USA)
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