Creating External File Layout

Often you want to create external files in a certain format so that they can be easily read or further processed by an external tool.

In addition to choosing between the standard file formats (FIXED, VARIABLE, etc.), you can use concatenation operators (||) and native format and conversion functions in the select list of the Export SQL statement.

You can produce headers and footers by having separate export tasks write dummy statements to the external file.

You do not need to format the external files as a separate routine.