External tables

An external table allows IBM® Netezza® to treat an external flat file as a database table. You can use external tables to access files that are stored on the Netezza host server. Additionally, Netezza can treat a file on a client system as a remote external table by using the REMOTESOURCE option.

Netezza environments also support system tables, which are stored on the host, and user tables, which are stored on the disks in the storage arrays.

You can use external tables to load data into an IBM Netezza appliance or store data outside an IBM Netezza appliance. If you use an external table to store data outside an appliance, you can transfer the data to another application or use the data as a table backup. You can also use data from an external table as part of an SQL query.

An external table has a definition, also called a table schema, but the actual data exists outside the Netezza appliance database. After you create the external table definition, you can use INSERT INTO statements to load data from the external file into a database table or use SELECT FROM statements to query the external table.