HOWTO: Selecting XML data directly from your local disk

On the OTN XMLDB Forum, a question was asked if you could directly select from a XML file on disk, or to be more precise “XQUERY / XMLTABLE Syntax to read and XML from a Windows local drive?“. I had the idea that this could be easily done, nowadays via XMLDB functionality. So I tried it and came to the following conclusions. Although tested on Oracle 11.1.0.6.0 on Windows, this should also work on Oracle 10.2.x.

So as you can read here… It can be very easily done…

SQL> conn test/test
Connected.
 
SQL> -- The test user has the DBA role...
 
SQL> select * from v$version;
 
BANNER
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Production
PL/SQL Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Production
CORE    11.1.0.6.0      Production
TNS for 32-bit Windows: Version 11.1.0.6.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 11.1.0.6.0 - Production
 
5 rows selected.
 
/* The content of the data.xml file that is located on E:\temp

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

  0
  
    0
    Text
  


*/
 
SQL> drop directory xmlstore;
 
Directory dropped.
 
SQL> -- the directory is on a Windows system...
 
SQL> create directory xmlstore as 'E:\temp';
 
Directory created.
 
SQL> create table test
  2  (xmldata xmltype);
 
Table created.
 
SQL> INSERT into test
  2  VALUES
  3  (XMLTYPE(bfilename('XMLSTORE','data.xml'),NLS_CHARSET_ID('AL32UTF8')));
 
1 row created. 
 
SQL> set long 100000000
 
SQL> select * from test;
 
XMLDATA
--------------------------------------------------------
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

  0
  
    0
    Text
  

 
 
1 row selected.
 
SQL> select XMLTYPE('00Text') as "XDATA"
  2  from dual;
 
XDATA
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
00Text
 
1 row selected.
 
 
SQL> select XMLTYPE(bfilename('XMLSTORE','data.xml'),NLS_CHARSET_ID('AL32UTF8')) as "XDATA"
  2  from dual;
ERROR:
ORA-21500: internal error code, arguments: [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s]
 
 
 
no rows selected
 
 
SQL> select extract((XMLTYPE(bfilename('XMLSTORE','data.xml'),NLS_CHARSET_ID('AL32UTF8'))),'*') as "XDATA"
  2  from dual;
 
XDATA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
00Text
 
1 row selected.
 
SQL> select xdata
  2  from (XMLTABLE('*'
  3                 PASSING (XMLTYPE(bfilename('XMLSTORE','data.xml'),NLS_CHARSET_ID('AL32UTF8')))
  4                 COLUMNS xdata xmltype PATH '/*'
  5                )
  6       )
  7  ;
 
XDATA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
00Text
 
1 row selected.

.

I hope this was of some help.

😎

Marco