List, In the 4th Qtr 2002 Select Journal magazine there is an interesting article by Robert G.Freeman of this list. Congratulations on being published again and helping the DBA's of the world increase their knowledge. The article talks about 9i external tables and it also creates a few questions about using external tables. Being a DBA I always try to make life easier for myself so I can use my time more productively. The article describes in detail the method of creating external tables and populating them from the alert_log. With the tables created you can access them from the database after they are populated with a load procedure. The updates to the external table are periodically made with updates into a temp table controlled by a scheduled job. While this method would suffice for keeping a copy of the alert_log in the database it is only up to date as the job that loads the temp and ultimately the external table. Working with different OS's can get confusing at times as the structure and commands can be different and confusing. It would be much nicer to create an external table that was actually the real alert_log that was being used by Oracle then you could access the database with the standard SQLPLUS command and select from the "alert_log" with any condition you desire. That way you would not have to remember all of the different locations and commands the view the alert_logs on different servers. The conclusions section of the article is a key part and informs us that this is just the beginning of the possibilities for external tables and encourages us to experiment on our own. When I get through with the latest server migration and I get 9i loaded in my test box I plan to experiment a lot. Thanks for the article, Ron Rogers DBA OCP ROR m���m
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