Re: v$abc.. table names - nightmare

I did - and I got the answer I wanted..

> Oracle came out of the DEC world, where using a dollar sign was
> considered a mark of he-man internals guru-dom.  On the pdp machines,
> $ was the identifier of the system account [1,2], on VMS machines it
> signified system objects in an object name.  Rather than a design no-
> no that should have been fixed, it is a backward compatibility
> convention that has no reason to change.  Oracle was written in C to
> be compatible across platforms, though real he-men programmed in
> BLISS, the language of the OS.  Meanwhile, unix was written in C, and
> is really where you have problems with shells and other pathetically
> eclectic languages doing strange stuff with with special characters
> screwed up substantial fractions of a century ago, not to mention the
> silliness of training generations of CS students to do application
> programming in C.  The blame isn't with Oracle here.

Oracle can choose to name their own tables as they wish. If it was my choice I would stick to A-Z0-9_-

> John answered your simple question, but I have to wonder what you've
> been doing that you aren't familiar with these common interactions.

Let me fill you in.
What I have been doing is writing scripts (and a whole load of C++ that calls them) that caters for monitoring of Windows, Solaris, Linux, MS SQL Server, Veritas Cluster Server, WMI, SNMP, HP Hardware, VMWare, Active Directory, ... etc etc ... and Oracle. So I have experience with a huge variety of interactions. This was just a simple question to see if I could simplify writing of the script for Oracle.
I am not an expert in Oracle, or really any of the technologies on this list. I have no time to be an expert in any of these, and I don't need to be.
What is more important for me is that the scripts follow a common standard - very specific STDOUT, STDERR and return code, respect a clearly documented set of environment variables, etc etc.

> As Sybrand noted, there may be a userenv way.  John was wrong (or
> joking) about Oracle versions though.  Everyone knows there was no
> Version 1, 'cause first versions always suck.

While I'm here. It's also annoying that Oracle doesn't let root have access to the database. I see references to some security issue with that all over the net, when this seems to be nonsense. Root has access to wipe the database clean, or su to any user anyway. Initially I was trying to run the script as root (like all my other scripts) but gave up on this too as I think root has to have dba as it's primary group to access via "/ AS SYSDBA".

I bet I've really stirred you all up now :-) ........ Received on Wed May 18 2011 - 13:21:23 CDT