Progress
Database Administration
Guide and Reference


Modifying a Bulk Loader Description File

You can use a text editor to change a Bulk Loader description (FD) file. Table 13–4 lists the tasks and actions.

Table 13–4: Modifying the Description File 
Task
Action
Include comments in the FD file.
Place a pound sign (#) at the beginning of each line.
Include the description of multiple tables in one description file.
Separate tables with a period on a line by itself.
Skip a field.
Replace the field name with a caret ( ^ ).

Using a text editor, change the description file to appear as follows:

customer       
  Cust-num   
  Name   
  ^   
  ^   
  City   
  St   
  ^   
  Phone   

In this example, the Bulk Loader utility loads the Cust-num, Name, City, St, and Phone fields, since they are the only fields specified in the description file. The carat ( ^ ) directs the Bulk Loader to skip a field. The Bulk Loader does not load any of the fields after Phone because they do not appear in the description file. The customer table name appears by itself on the top line.

By default, the Bulk Loader adds .d and .e extensions to the table name to produce the two file names it requires to operate. It assumes that both of the files (the data file and the error file) begin with the table name. If this assumption is false, you must specify the different filenames. For example, if you dump the customer table into cust.d instead of customer.d, you must specify the name cust.d in the bulk loader description file. Otherwise, the Bulk Loader searches the current directory for customer.d:

#This is an example 
customer   cust.d cust.e 
  Cust-num 
  Name 
  ^ 
  ^ 
   City 
  St 
  ^ 
  Phone  
. 
item 
  Item-num 
  Idesc 
. 
order 
  Order-num 
  ^ 
  Name 


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