Query External Data

For example:

BEGIN
  DBMS_CLOUD.CREATE_CREDENTIAL(
    credential_name => 'DEF_CRED_NAME',
    username => 'adb_user@example.com',
    password => 'password' );
END;
/

Creating a credential to access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Store is not required if you enable resource principal credentials. See Use Resource Principal to Access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Resources for more information.

This operation stores the credentials in the database in an encrypted format. You can use any name for the credential name. Note that this step is required only once unless your object store credentials change. Once you store the credentials you can then use the same credential name for creating external tables.

See CREATE_CREDENTIAL Procedure for information about the username and password parameters for different object storage services.

The procedure DBMS_CLOUD.CREATE_EXTERNAL_TABLE supports external files in the supported cloud object storage services. The credential is a table level property; therefore, the external files must be on the same object store.

For example:

BEGIN
   DBMS_CLOUD.CREATE_EXTERNAL_TABLE(
    table_name =>'CHANNELS_EXT',
    credential_name =>'DEF_CRED_NAME',
    file_uri_list =>'https://objectstorage.us-phoenix-1.oraclecloud.com/n/namespace-string/b/bucketname/o/channels.txt',
    format => json_object('delimiter' value ','),
    column_list => 'CHANNEL_ID VARCHAR2(2), CHANNEL_DESC VARCHAR2(20), CHANNEL_CLASS VARCHAR2(20)' );
END;
/

The parameters are:

• table_name: is the external table name.

• credential_name: is the name of the credential created in the previous step. The credential_name parameter must conform to Oracle object naming conventions. See Database Object Naming Rules for more information.

  The credential_name parameter is not used when you specify a directory or a Table Hyperlink URL with file_uri_list. See Creating and Managing Directories on Autonomous AI Database and About Table Hyperlinks on Autonomous AI Database for more information.

• file_uri_list: is a comma delimited list of the source files you want to query.

• format: defines the options you can specify to describe the format of the source file.

  If the data in your source files is encrypted, decrypt the data by specifying the format parameter with the encryption option. See Decrypt Data While Importing from Object Storage for more information on decrypting data.

• column_list: is a comma delimited list of the column definitions in the source files.

In this example, namespace-string is the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure object storage namespace and bucketname is the bucket name. See Understanding Object Storage Namespaces for more information.

You can now run queries on the external table you created in the previous step. For example:

SELECT count(*) FROM channels_ext;

By default the database expects all rows in the external data file to be valid and match both the target data type definitions as well as the format definition of the files. If there are any rows in the source files that do not match the format options you specified, the query reports an error. You can use DBMS_CLOUD parameters, like rejectlimit, to suppress these errors. As an alternative, you can also validate the external table you created to see the error messages and the rejected rows so that you can change your format options accordingly. See Validate External Data for more information.

For detailed information about the parameters, see CREATE_EXTERNAL_TABLE Procedure.

See DBMS_CLOUD URI Formats for more information on the supported cloud object storage services.