Update Oracle table with values from CSV file

Question

I have a CSV file which contains an ID and several other columns. I also have a table in oracle where the ID identifies a row. How can I best replace the values that are in

Answer 1

Use SQL*Loader

sqlldr username@server/password control=load_csv.ctl

The load_csv.ctl file

load data
 infile '/path/to/mydata.csv'
 into table mydatatable
 fields terminated by "," optionally enclosed by '"'          
 ( empno, empname, sal, deptno )

where /path/to/mydata.csv is the path to the CSV file that you need to load, on Windows something like C:\data\mydata.csv. The tablename is mydatatable. The columns are listed in order that they apear in the csv file on the last line.

Unless you have a very large volume of data this is the easiest to maintain way of getting the data in. If the data needs to be loaded on a regular basis this can be worked into a shell script and run by CRON on a U*NX system.