Basic Oracle Concepts and Programming Question:

An external table is a table defined in the database with data stored outside the database. Data of an external table is stored in files on the operating systems. Accessing data of external tables are done through data access drivers. Currently, Oracle supports two data access drivers: ORACLE_LOADER and ORACLE_DATAPUMP.

External tables can be used to load data from external files into database, or unload data from database to external files.