create external table with headers in netezza (postgres)

Question

I am creating an external table as shown below

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE '~\test.csv' 
USING ( DELIMITER ',' Y2BASE 2000 ENCODING 'internal' REMOTESOURCE 'ODBC' ESCAPECHAR '\' )
AS SELECT * FROM TEST_TABLE;

It works fine. My question is :

Is there a way we can name the header values as column names in the test.csv file ? Is it possible in either Netezza or postgres.

I think we can do it using COPY, however I want to do it using the EXTERNAL TABLE command.

Thanks

Answer 1

In version 7.2 of Netezza you can now specify the IncludeHeader option to achieve this with external tables.

This is documented here

Answer 2

It's not pretty, and it would likely add some amount of overhead to the query, but you could do something like this:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE ... AS
SELECT ColumnId, OtherColumn 
FROM (
    SELECT FALSE as IsHeader, ColumnId::VARCHAR(512), OtherColumn::VARCHAR(512)
    FROM TEST_TABLE
    UNION ALL
    SELECT TRUE as IsHeader, 'ColumnId', 'OtherColumn'
) x
ORDER BY IsHeader DESC