Re: A very novice question about ascii files

On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Leslie Johnson - Contractor wrote:

> Hi all,
> This is probably a very stupid question but I'm working on a really tight
> deadline and I'm very confused. I've got several incredibly hefty ascii
> files that were at one point Oracle databases. Now they're just plain
> ascii dump files and today I got asked to put them in PGSQL but I have no
> idea how (I've never even worked with databases before except for the
> offline variety.) Can anybody please point me towards some documentation
> that would be helpful or give me some advice?
> Thanks so much,
> Leslie

Leslie,

I had to load quite a few flat files dumped from a PROGRESS database.
They contained lots of errors (PROGRESS is so sloppy it allowed the
user to enter control characters into varchar() fields!)

Anyhoo, it was no picnic but I have some shell scripts that ask sed
to fix a few things so they are more to PG's liking. If you like
send a sample of the data to the list and I'll have a go...
It doesn't matter if you send fake data (working in psychiatry I'm
familiar with confidentiality issues) as long as it's representative
of the problem in front of you. If I can help I'll send you back
a shell script...

With luck your data is tab delimited. ;-)
Mine was but had embedded tabs! He he...sed prevailed nonetheless.

Cheers,
Tom

--------------------------------------------------------------------
SVCMC - Center for Behavioral Health
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Good tomg@ { admin | q8 } .nrnet.org
IS Coordinator / DBA Phone: 718-354-5528
Fax: 718-354-5056
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Powered by: PostgreSQL s l a c k w a r e FreeBSD:
RDBMS |---------- linux The Power To Serve
--------------------------------------------------------------------