Building Very Large Records

[Greg Lindstrom]

Hello-

I am working on a routine to pull information from an Oracle database and
format it into fixed-length records. My problem is that the record layout
is quite long (over 500 bytes) and contains dozens of fields. How would
*you* go about building such a beast? I know that using the += operator is
a bad idea, as it creates a new copy of the string each time. How about the
struct.pack() method? A very big '%-12.12s%-50.50s.......' statement?
Other ideas? It does not have to be blazingly fast, but it doesn't have to
suck, either. I don't know enough about Oracle SQL yet, could I format the
data in the SQL call?

Thanks,

Greg Lindstrom [phone]
NovaSys Health gr************@novasyshealth.com

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams" W.W.

[Alex Martelli]

Greg Lindstrom <gr************@novasyshealth.com> wrote:

Hello-

I am working on a routine to pull information from an Oracle database and
format it into fixed-length records. My problem is that the record layout
is quite long (over 500 bytes) and contains dozens of fields. How would
*you* go about building such a beast? I know that using the += operator is
a bad idea, as it creates a new copy of the string each time. How about the
struct.pack() method? A very big '%-12.12s%-50.50s.......' statement?

Yep, except that what you're quoting ain't a statement, just a string.
But put a % after it and the right tuple after that, and you''re going
somewhere!-)
Alex

[Elbert Lev]

>>I don't know enough about Oracle SQL yet, could I format the data in
the SQL call?

This would be the best solution. Especially if done via stored
procedure. I also do not know how to do this in Oracle. In MSSQL I
would write an extended stored prosedure.