Good morning,

Currently my company is in the process of moving from an Oracle to a
Postgres environment. One of the challenges we're facing is handling
the loading of fixed width data files into Postgres. In Oracle we
could define the columns in a control file, but I'm having trouble
figuring that out in Postgres. Delimited files are no problem, and the
copy command works for most of our needs, but is there not a native
way to import fixed width data into postgres? I'd prefer to not right
a script to read the file and make it delimited, then have to load it,
as the files we are loading contain millions of records.

Anyone have any thoughts or dealt with this previously? Am I going to
be forced to right a parser script in perl or python to convert the
file from fixed width to delimited?

Thanks for your help.

Begin <1169748670.135917.62540 (AT) s48g2000cws (DOT) googlegroups.com>
On 2007-01-25, David McNelis <dmcnelis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Why? Is oracle somehow bound to output fixed width data?


Not that I know of.


It may be a better idea to write scripts instead. Note that if using
unix it is easy to use pipes to avoid intermediate storage, and the
extra work an efficient script does is neglible compared to the work the
database does inserting the data.


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