Is it possible for Oracle sqlldr to accept a TNS entry as an instance qualifier in Oracle 10 and 11?

Question

Is it possible to use a fully qualified TNS entry using sqlldr bundled with Oracle 10/11?

For example, in SQLPlus:

    sqlplus user/password@(description=(address=(host=localhost)(protocol=tcp)(port=1521))(connect_data=(sid=orcl))) @script.sql

But using sqlldr (SQL Loader) there appear to be issues with using the TNS entry directly. Specifically:

    sqlldr user/password@(description=(address=(host=localhost)(protocol=tcp)(port=1521))(connect_data=(sid=orcl))) bad='bad_file.txt' control='control.ctl' data='data.txt' log='log.txt' direct='true'

Here is the error message produced:

    LRM-00116: syntax error at 'address' following '('

    SQL*Loader: Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Sep 13 15:41:54 2011

    Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates.  All rights reserved.

    SQL*Loader-100: Syntax error on command-line

Attempting to encapsulate the TNS entry in quotes produces the same error.

Had a look at the sqlldr documentation, and attempted to use the 'userid' command-line argument to no avail. Specifically:

sqlldr userid='user/password@(description=(address=(host=localhost)(protocol=tcp)(port=1521))(connect_data=(sid=orcl)))' bad='bad.txt' control='control.ctl' data='data.txt' log='log.txt' direct='true'
LRM-00116: syntax error at 'password@(' following '='

SQL*Loader: Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Sep 13 15:44:17 2011

Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates.  All rights reserved.

SQL*Loader-100: Syntax error on command-line

It makes sense that Oracle would hope to coerce the user to a local instance to mitigate I/O in pushing data to a remote host. But the deviation in supported syntax is not so intuitive. Anyone else experience similar issues?

Answer 1

fwiw, this guy posted a solution to this problem

http://www.simplemancomplexmachine.com/2011/10/sqlldr-one-liner-to-remote-database.html

Yes there is a one-line solution and you can use a TNS connect string to do this from the command line. The key is formatting the connection string a little different as it must be quoted. Additionally the quotes and parentheses must be escaped (backslashes):

sqlldr userid=dbuser@\"\(description=\(address=\(host=remote.db.com\)\(protocol=tcp\)\(port=1521\)\)\(connect_data=\(sid=dbsid\)\)\)\"/dbpass control=controlfilename.ctl data=data.csv

Note that in the original blog post he had a space in front of '/dbpass'. This causes sqlldr to give the error:

LRM-00112: multiple values not allowed for parameter 'userid'

Answer 2

Looks like you need to escape characters like '(', ')' and '=' with the escape character '\' (i.e. backslash) as explained in here.