Pipelined Functions, External Tables, and Their Use as ETL tools – Part 1 of 3

(John Palinski) Oracle9i introduced the Oracle community to pipelined functions. Select statements can use these pipeline functions as a data source. This functionality opens up several new possibilities. Pipeline functions offer the potential to create custom data sources, combine a variety of functions and logic into a single data source object, and to enhance the extraction transformation and loading of flat file data into an Oracle table. This article is the first of three that discuss the uses of pipelined functions, external tables (flat files), and how to increase the performance of extracting, transforming, and loading flat file data into a data warehouse. In this article, you will see how to create a pipelined function, use it to create a data source, and how to combine a variety of functions and table attributes into a single database object that describes a Sales person entity.