Craig Ringer wrote:
For those non-Oracle users among us, what's an external table?
External tables let you map a text file directly to a table without explicitly loading it. In PostgreSQL, if you have data in a CSV file, usually you'd import it with COPY before you'd use it. If external tables were available, you'd just say there's an external table as a CSV file and you could start running queries against it.
So the quick answer is no, there is no built-in external table support in PostgreSQL; normally people load the data using COPY instead. There's a work in progress on this topic at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgexternaltable/ , but it's extremely rough at this point and I'm not sure if it's even moving in the right direction--the main project would do something like this via SQL/MED, and I don't think that's how the prototype is being built at all.
The only PostgreSQL-based product I'm aware of that has working external table support already is Greenplum DB.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx www.2ndQuadrant.com -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
