External tables

External tables are a fast and versatile method for moving data between database servers. External tables are the fastest method for loading data into a RAW table with no indexes.

You run the CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE statement to define an external table that is not part of your database to unload data from your database. You run INSERT ... SELECT statements to load data from the external table into your database.

You can unload and load data in the internal HCL OneDB™ representation. All HCL OneDB data types are supported. You can define a value to be interpreted as a NULL when you load or unload data from an external table. You can specify the date and currency format and replace missing values with column defaults.

You define a named pipe to copy data from one HCL OneDB instance to another without writing the data to an intermediate file. You can monitor the I/O queues to determine whether you have enough FIFO virtual processors. If necessary, you can add more FIFO virtual processors to improve performance. You can specify to run high-speed transfers in parallel.

Rows that have conversion errors during a load are written to a reject file on the server that performs the conversion.