Transferring data in plain text file format is common when performing tasks such as loading a database for the first time, data warehouse maintenance, ASCII backups, or spatial data management. Knowing how to efficiently use and tailor this tool allows the user to optimize the time invested in performing one of the most labor intensive and time consuming maintenance tasks.

During the upload process it is important to foresee any space allocation issues that may prevent the load process from successfully finishing. It is important to either gauge the tablespace requirements, or proactively launch automatic space management tasks.

It is important to know how to perform the data load with different character sets, so that users don't risk losing data, and to ensure that even if the data load completes successfully it doesn't end up showing those boring 'question marks' because of character set incompatibilities.

There are several ways to perform the load of large objects...