Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Table (database)" in English language version.
Oracle 9i introduced external tables [...] read-only from the Oracle database. In Oracle 10g, you can write to external tables.
You use external tables to load and unload data to or from your database. You can also use external tables to query data in text files that are not in an Informix database.
An external table is a table that is NOT stored within the Oracle database. Data is loaded from a file via an access driver (normally ORACLE_LOADER) when the table is accessed. One can think of an external table as a view that allows running SQL queries against files on a filesystem [...].
