Re: SQLPLUS and equivalents

"Laurence Barwick" <barwick_at_gmx.co.uk> wrote in message news:99pqes$28i30$1_at_ID-37705.news.dfncis.de...
>
> a wet-behind-the ears newbie writes:
>
> I am making my first hesitant steps in the wonderful world of Oracle, some
> of which involve intensive contact with a nice little utility called
> SQLPLUS (or however it is written, I'm sure I've left out an asterisk
> somewhere ;-)
>
> My question is: is it possible to configure SQLPLUS to use such niceties
 as
> command-line history and editing? As is (fire-and-forget one-line editing)
> it reminds me all too vividly of the days when MS-DOS was little more than
> an upstart rival to CP/M ...
>
> My second question is: are there any other client-style programs
 equivalent
> to SQLPLUS? Preferably text console-based, although no doubt something
 GUIey
> would suffice. I seem to recall glimpsing the name of some such beast
> during the installation (I currently have 8.1.6 on Linux), can't for the
> life of me find it.
>
> I would be very happy to RTFM if someone would give me a pointer to which
> of the many FMs I should R ;-)
>
>
> Yours
>
> Laurence Barwick
>

Get Toad at www.toadsoft.com It has a command like interface with GUI drag and drop assistance, command line recall, a schema browser, et cetera. If you go for the freeware version you need to download it every month or so, but the file is not big in size.
With respect to FM: You definitely should read the Oracle Concepts Manual. For the rest it depends which route you are heading: developer or dba. You will of course need a command of sql and apart from buying Oracle, the complete reference, by Kevin Loney, you could of course always consult the SQL reference manual and (with respect to the data dictionary) the Oracle Reference manual. Sooner or later you will also need the PL/SQL manual and the Oracle Application Developers Guide when heading for developer. If you head for DBA: yes, you should read all of them.

Two last remarks:
Those youngsters GUI-aficionados frequently scorn SQL*Plus, but evidently they don't know what you can do with it (including generatin reports, and switching your printer to landscape)
Finally: Too many Oracle newbies have a SqlServer background. I don't know whether that applies to you, but usually those newbies 'port' their bad SqlServer habits to Oracle. Just try to escape from the Evil Empire and forget about SqlServer.

Hth,

Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA Received on Tue Mar 27 2001 - 10:11:34 CST