Re: HELP! Default date format in SQL*Plus isn't dd-mon-yy!

"R" <R_at_R.R> wrote in message news:<R3o7a.346663$Yo4.12259846_at_news1.calgary.shaw.ca>...
> "Volker Hetzer" <volker.hetzer_at_ieee.org> wrote in message
> news:b3knm5$e8s$1_at_dackel.pdb.sbs.de...
> >
> > "R" <R_at_R.R> wrote in message
> news:CUk7a.94352$na.1798369_at_news2.calgary.shaw.ca...
> > > What my problem (now resolved) was that I was not entering the ALTER
> SESSION
> > > statement correctly to set the NLS parameters. I was trying:
> > >
> > > SET NLS_variable = whatever
> > >
> > > and
> > >
> > > ALTER SESSION NLS_variable = whaterver
> > >
> > > but it's actually
> > >
> > > ALTER SESSION SET NLS_variable = whatever
> > >
> > > I'm finding Oracle to have the most inconsistent command structure that
> I've
> > > ever seen!
> > What's wrong with it?
> > That command line says that there are (or might be) several ways of
> altering
> > a session and setting variable is just one of them.
> > Therefore the "ALTER SESSION SET ..." makes sense.
>
> It just seems to have no structure... sometimes SET needs an "=" symbol to
> assign a value, sometimes not. The BREAK command separates its parameters
> with "ON" instead of commas. When insert data into multiple tables at one
> time you can't use the native column names... you must specify alias' for
> them. To clear the format on a column it's "COLUMN CLEAR..." but to clear
> all columns its "CLEAR COLUMN"
>
> Finding any kind of help on the Oracle website is just insane. With all the
> icons that the Oracle install puts into my start menu it would make sense to
> include some kind of command reference. Oracle documentation is worse than
> Microsoft documentation!

So I take it from this you have read all the documentation and understand that SQL*Plus and the Oracle RDBMS and the SQL language it supports are two different products. So to continue your MS analogy it would be like expecting Word commands to work in Excel.

And if you look in your SQL Reference manual, you would find a consistency among commands that perform modifications to say a session parameter or a table column. For example

alter session set nls_date_format = 'mmddyyyy';

looks a lot like

update emp set ename = 'fred';

Now when you look in your SQL*Plus reference manual, you will find all sorts of none SQL commands that do things that SQL doesn't typically do, like format columns and spool to files, for reporting purposes say. As SQL*Plus also issues SQL the command structure would have to be different otherwise there would be conflicts and you would be unable to do anything reliably.

Full documentation, requiring free registration, is available at

http://tahiti.oracle.com

You should actually read the SQL and SQL*Plus reference manuals before publishing opinions on their quality to newsgroups. Many people find them clear and well written and have learned to do their jobs effectively without resorting to publicly blaming the tools they use.

Hth

Martin Received on Thu Feb 27 2003 - 14:00:18 CST