Hi Tim,

many thanks for your help.

At last we decide to start the process from a main shell script, which is also the most reasonable, who gets the CSV files via FTP, then runs SQL*Loader, and at last runs the PHP-aplication to analiuze the imported data.

We can't use External Tables since we still use Oracle 8.1.7, but that's good to know. I work with 9i in other projects.

The matter came out because we develop on MySQL 4.x, then we'll migrate the DB to Oracle 8.1.7 . MySQL accepts statements similar to the content of a SQL*Loader control file, as if they were SQL statements, being sent from a PHP-application. This does not work with Oracle.