Oracle SQL sqlldr not importing correctly

Question

SQL> desc FLIGHTS;
 Name                                      Null?    Type
 ----------------------------------------- -------- ----------------------------
 FLNO                                               NUMBER(38)
 FROM                                               VARCHAR2(64)
 TO                                                 VARCHAR2(64)
 DISTANCE                                           NUMBER(38)
 DEPARTS                                            DATE
 ARRIVES                                            DATE
 PRICE                                              FLOAT(63)

data file:

99,Los Angeles,Washington D.C.,2308,2005/04/12 09:30,2005/04/12 21:40,235.98
13,Los Angeles,Chicago,1749,2005/04/12 08:45,2005/04/12 20:45,220.98
346,Los Angeles,Dallas,1251,2005/04/12 11:50,2005/04/12 19:05,225.43
387,Los Angeles,Boston,2606,2005/04/12 07:03,2005/04/12 17:03,261.56

and sqlldr control file:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'flights.txt' 
 INTO TABLE Flights 
  FIELDS TERMINATED BY "," 
  ( FLNO
  , FROM
  , TO
  , DISTANCE
  , DEPARTS
  , ARRIVES
  , PRICE)

An exerpt from the error log:

Table FLIGHTS, loaded from every logical record.
Insert option in effect for this table: INSERT

   Column Name                  Position   Len  Term Encl Datatype
------------------------------ ---------- ----- ---- ---- ---------------------
FLNO                                FIRST     *   ,       CHARACTER            
FROM                                 NEXT     *   ,       CHARACTER            
TO                                   NEXT     *   ,       CHARACTER            
DISTANCE                             NEXT     *   ,       CHARACTER            
DEPARTS                              NEXT     *   ,       CHARACTER            
ARRIVES                              NEXT     *   ,       CHARACTER            
PRICE                                NEXT     *   ,       CHARACTER            

Record 1: Rejected - Error on table FLIGHTS, column FROM.
ORA-01747: invalid user.table.column, table.column, or column specification

I am not sure what is wrong with my SQL, but I'm assuming it is because of the FROM entry?

Answer 1

Firstly, calling columns from and to is a bad idea, they're key-words. Something like origin and destination might be better...

Secondly, float, this really isn't needed. The chances of you needing a price to 63 decimal places is remote. Something like number(18,2) should be more than sufficient (ridiculous in fact), but if you want the absolute maximum use number(38,2).

My last pre-answer point is your datafile. If at all possible get your supplier to change this. A comma delimited file is just asking for trouble... there are far too many ways for a comma to be in the data. If you can have it | or ¬ delimited it's better as they're hardly ever used in text.

Depending on your NLS_PARAMETERS, there's no guarantee that the date in the file will be altered into the date you need in your table. It's best to explicitly specify this on entry into the database like this:

LOAD DATA 
 INFILE 'flights.txt' 
 INTO TABLE Flights 
  FIELDS TERMINATED BY "," 
  ( FLNO
  , FROM
  , TO
  , DISTANCE
  , DEPARTS "to_date(:departs,'yyyy/mm/dd hh24:mi')"
  , ARRIVES "to_date(:arrives,'yyyy/mm/dd hh24:mi')"
  , PRICE DECIMAL EXTERNAL
    )

Notice that I've also changed PRICE into a decimal, if you look at your log file, everything is supposedly a character, which means you're doing an implicit conversion, which may not be guaranteed.

Why you got your specific error message? I don't actually know. I also suspect it's because you've got a column called FROM. According to the control file documentation there's no SQL*Loader keyword from, so I can only posit that it's some problem with SQL*Loader's communication with Oracle.

Here's another good resource on syntax.