Loading Documents

The default indexing behavior expects documents loaded in a text column.

Note: Even though the system expects documents to be loaded in a text column, you can also store your documents in other ways, including the file system and as a URL. For more information about data storage, see "Datastore Objects" in Chapter 3.

Supported Column Types

By default, the system expects your documents to be loaded in a text column. Your text column can be VARCHAR2, CLOB, BLOB, CHAR or BFILE.

Note: Storing data in the deprecated column types of LONG and LONG RAW is supported only for migrating Oracle7 systems to Oracle8. The column types NCLOB, DATE and NUMBER cannot be indexed.

Supported Document Formats

Because the system can index most document formats including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and plain text, you can load any of these document types into the text column.

See Also: For more information about the supported document formats, see Appendix C, "Supported Filter Formats".

Loading Methods

INSERT Statement

You can use the SQL INSERT statement to load documents to a table.

The following example creates a table with two columns, id and text, using CREATE TABLE. The example populates the table with the INSERT statement. This example makes the id column the primary key, which is the required constraint for a Text table. The text column is VARCHAR2:

create table docs (id number primary key, text varchar2(80));

To populate this table, use the INSERT statement as follows:

insert into docs values(1, 'this is the text of the first document');
insert into docs values(12, 'this is the text of the second document');

Loading Text Data from File-System

In addition to the INSERT statement, Oracle enables you to load text data (this includes documents, pointers to documents, and URLs) into a table from your file-system using other automated methods, including

• SQL*Loader

• ctxload executable

• DBMS_LOB.LOADFROMFILE() PL/SQL procedure to load LOBs from BFILEs

• Oracle Call Interface

  See Also: For loading examples, including how to use SQL*Loader, see Appendix D, "Loading Examples". To learn more about ctxload, see "ctxload" in Chapter 11. For more information about the DBMS_LOB package, see Oracle8i Supplied PL/SQL Packages Reference. For more information about working with LOBs, see the Oracle8i Application Developer's Guide - Large Objects (LOBs). For more information about Oracle Call Interface, see Oracle Call Interface Programmer's Guide