Originally posted by jmodic
yet SQL*Loader can chew only plain ASCII files.
Oh Jurij, I don't think that's quite true:

SQL*Loader supports different character encoding schemes (called character sets, or code pages). SQL*Loader uses features of Oracle's globalization support technology to handle the various single-byte and multibyte character encoding schemes available today.

See Also:
Oracle9i Database Globalization Support Guide

In general, loading shift-sensitive character data can be much slower than loading simple ASCII or EBCDIC data.