Sending Textual Emails From Oracle By Elie Grunhaus

Introduction

We are all aware how important email has become in our daily business activities. This importance extends itself to database activities as well. Having our database automatically send email messages or alerts to designated persons has become a much sought after feature.

For example, an ETL (Extraction, Load, Transformation) process encounters unexpected data values while trying to load dimension and fact tables in a data warehouse. Or, perhaps someone attempts an unauthorized access to a table containing sensitive data. Each of these situations would warrant the database server to send an email capturing the event.

Here I'll show how we can implement such an email transfer in Oracle using the package UTL_SMTP which comes standard with version 8.1.6 and above.

I'll show how we can easily get the Oracle server to transmit textual emails on demand to as many recipients as desired. The key to doing this is knowing how to utilize the builtin package SYS.UTL_SMTP which comes standard with versions 8.1.6 and above...

Read the complete text of "Sending Email with Oracle" By Elie Grunhaus (182kb pdf)

Get the sample SQL files that accompany this article (7kb zip)