Hi-
I am trying to achieve the following in a script so I can schedule it on a cron job. I am fairly new to the unix environment...

I have written a shell script that reads a flat file and loads the data into an Oracle table (Table1) via SQLLDR. This Works fine. Then, I run a nested insert statement to parse through the records in Table1 and load the necessary results into a Table. (Table2). This works fine too.

Here is how my script looks like...

# Always truncate table 1 before loading data.
print "truncate table table1;" | sqlplus -s userid/password@db>$now.log
sqlldr userid/password@db control=dbload.ctl>>$now.log
# Always truncate table 2 before loading data.
print "truncate table table2;" | sqlplus -s userid/password@db>>$now.log
# Parse through Table1 and load only necessary records to Table2.
print "insert into table2 select id, min(STARTDATE) as startdate from table1 group by id, to_char(STARTDATE,'mm/dd/yyyy');" | sqlplus -s userid/password@db>>$now.log

I call this script myscript.sh, which will be run via crontab every 15 mins.

Here are my questions:
1) Note how I establish a database connection to execute every sql I need to run? I am thinking there should be an easy way to this. I looked into the "here documents" but not sure how I can use them above. Do I really need to use the "here document" or is my script good the way as it is now?
Would it open and close the db connections for each sql correctly?

If I do use the "here document", do I need to have one for the sqlldr and the other for all the sqlplus part?

Please advise best way to go ahead.
Thanks
RG