8i SQL Plus Edit Question

Server 8.1.7.4.0, SQL Plus 8.1.7.0.0 I'm trying to see if SQL PLus can accept more characters in an SQL statement than it does.

I am finished working on a pretty hideous SQL statement that was more than 10,000 characters*. I use MS Access as a front end tool against our Oracle database, using Oracle SQL (bypassing the Jet database engine which is integral to Access). This works fine, but when I come up against errors in my SQL that don't jump out at me immediately, I like to copy the SQL statement to SQL plus which gives me a line location and often a specific pointer to where in a line my error is.

However, SQL Plus won't let me paste the entirity of the long SQL into it. When I go to edit mode and paste the full SQL into Notepad and then close to return to SQL Plus, it only accepts up to a specific amount of characters and drops the rest, giving me a message that line whatever has been truncated.

I tried going into the environment menu and setting the screen buffer, thinking that might do it, but this only allows me to increase from the install default (I think) of 1000 to a max of 2000.

I eventually got the SQL running just fine but I'm wondering if and how one can adjust SQL Plus to accept more characters.

Thanks very much in advance for any replies on this.

• Note to file - the extreme (for me) length of this statement was because the Oracle app vendor on whose app I am working to write reports has really lost their way and dealt with the same data entities in completely different ways, depending on whether a single or multiple entities is tied to a specific record on a main table. Basically, the intended function is to be able to write a single work order against either one location (in which case the location PK is written to a PK field in the work order table) or multiple locations (you would think they would have just used a many to many relationship, but they created another entity altogether to represent set "groups" of locations and write the group identifier to the work order table in a separate column) While the intended functioning of their approach works on screen, it makes it virtually impossible for any of their clients to do any straighforward analysis of costs. -- Tim http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~tmarshal/ ^o< /#) "Burp-beep, burp-beep, burp-beep?" - Quaker Jake /^^ "Whatcha doin?" - Ditto "TIM-MAY!!" - Me