Question

I don’t have time to write a perl or anything like that nor do I have admin access to the back end, so how can I get data from a file on the intranet (http://) and parse it to create a table? Maybe somehow via PL/SQL? Keep in mind I don’t have much admin access.

Answer 1

If you want it to be completely automated

• You can use the UTL_HTTP package to retrieve the data from the HTTP server
• You can either parse the CSV response yourself using INSTR and SUBSTR or you can use the UTL_FILE package to write the data to a file on the database server file system and then create an external table that parses the CSV file you just created.
• You can then insert the parsed data into a table you’ve already created (I’m assuming that the CSV data is in the same format each time).
• You can use the DBMS_SCHEDULER or DBMS_JOB package to schedule the job

The Oracle database account you’re using will need to be granted access to all of these packages.