Passing Contents of File as Parameter to Sql*Plus Command - oracle

Question

I'm trying to write a sqlplus command that creates a table from a query that is stored in an .sql file.
The particular .sql file that contains the query would be supplied to my sqlplus command as a variable (&v_InputQuery).
I've tried something like this, but it doesn't work.
CREATE TABLE &v_OutputTable AS
(
< &v_InputQuery
)
;
I get an error saying that there's a missing SELECT keyword.
What I'd really like is for &v_InputQuery to be replaced not with the name of the file specified by the user, but with the actual contents of the file. Is there a way to do that?
Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do that. If your query is in a file called v_InputQuery.sql, you can do this:
CREATE TABLE &v_OutputTable AS (
#v_InputQuery.sql
) ;
It's important that the # is the first character on the line. SQL*Plus will read the file and put its contents at that location. So make sure you don't have any terminating characters in the file such as ; or /.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, You cannot create a SQL*Plus command, but instead create a shell script to do it!
Lets say my_script.sh is below
#you can always complete the user interaction at unix/dos
USER=your_user
PASS=your_pass
DB=your_db
OUTPUT_TABLE=$1;
QUERY_FILE=$2;
SELECT_QUERY=`cat $QUERY_FILE`;
sqlplus -S ${USER}/${PASS}#${DB} << !
SET SERVEROUTPUT ON;
VAR EXITCODE NUMBER;
BEGIN
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE ' CREATE TABLE $OUTPUT_TABLE AS $SELECT_QUERY ';
:EXITCODE := SQLCODE;
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(SQLERRM);
:EXITCODE := SQLCODE;
END;
/
exit :EXITCODE
!
Executing the script as below(Depends on OS)
ksh my_script MY_OUTPUT_TABLE my_sql.sql;

Answer 3

Expanding a comment, #MaheswaranRavisankar's approach will work, but the dynamic SQL (i.e. execute immediate) isn't necessary, so the anonymous block isn't necessary either. It can be simplified somewhat to:
USER=your_user
PASS=your_pass
DB=your_db
OUTPUT_TABLE=$1;
QUERY_FILE=$2;
SELECT_QUERY=`cat $QUERY_FILE`;
sqlplus -S ${USER}/${PASS}#${DB} << !
WHENEVER SQLERROR EXIT FAILURE
CREATE TABLE $OUTPUT_TABLE AS $SELECT_QUERY
!
This also allows you to use a query which is already terminated by a ; or /, which the execute immediate version wouldn't like - you just need to decide whether your wrapper script needs one to match what your query files will contain.
Even the whenever ... line isn't vital, but the other answer tried to exit with the error code so I've mimicked that too somewhat. This will always exit with a generic failure status though (1 in Unix, not sure what Windows does). You can then test if it was successful with $? in the script if you want to.
You can exit with the actual SQL error instead of the generic value, by using whenever sqlerror exit sql.sqlcode instead. The problem with doing that is that most (all?) shells limit the return code to the range 0-255, so most errors will wrap and give something unhelpful anyway - a fairly-likely ORA-00955: name is already used by an existing object error would give a shell exit value of 187, for example. And it's possible the wrapped value would be zero, which would mask that an error occurred at all; an also-plausible ORA-01536: space quota exceeded for tablespace '%s' error would give a shell exit code of zero, which is unhelpful. Using exit failure would at least stop that.