Named Pipe

A named pipe (or FIFO) can be accessed by two separate processes on a machine - one process opens the pipe as the writer, and the other as a reader. The Named Pipe destination serves as the writer. Another process running on the same Data Collector machine can serve as the reader.

Use the destination to send data to an application that can read data from a named pipe. For example, the Greenplum gpload utility supports loading data from named pipes. You can configure the utility to read from the named pipe written to by the Named Pipe destination. The utility can then load that data into a Greenplum database.

Before you use the Named Pipe destination, you must create a named pipe on the machine where Data Collector is installed. You also must configure the named pipe reader - or reading application - that runs on the Data Collector machine to receive the data from the same named pipe.

When you configure the Named Pipe destination, you enter the full path to the local named pipe that you created. You also specify the data format that the destination uses to write data to the named pipe.