Re: How to print column heading only in SQL plus

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 21:37:19 +0000, Mladen Gogala wrote:

> On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 19:05:45 +0100, Eric wrote:
>

>> If I write Perl, no-one else on the site can understand it - sometimes
>> I'm not sure I can. And it doesn't officially exist anyway, even though
>> our database servers tend to have two installations, the one in oracle
>> and the one in Data Protector (formerly omniback).

I have thought about leaving this at that "in your face" one-liner, but then decided against that. Perl is one of the best known scripting languages in the world. If your administration staff, be it DBA or SA, don't know Perl and you're not a Windows shop, then your company is employing the wrong people.
As for the virtues of shell, yes, it is a glue. If overused, it gives birth to an IT equivalent of what is known as "junk art" among the art connoisseurs. Personally, I have bad experience with that, too. I was employed by the company who wrote the whole process of creating a standby database as a shell script. They didn't want to use Data*Guard and dg_broker because the lead DBA didn't know it and didn't understand it. Needless to say, I didn't stay with that company for a long time. My post doesn't say just "use Perl", what I'm advocating is using the right tool for the job. There is one thing that I'm sure of: sqlplus is not a report writing tool. It doesn't matter how much of sed, awk, cut and grep you glue to it, it will never become a good report writing tool. For that matter, neither will Perl. Perl has built-in "format" directive which can do certain things really well, like printing fixed column headers, page headers and doing page breaks, there is even more powerful CPAN module called Perl6::Form, but neither can deal with things like groups and totals, which are marks of any decent report writing tool like RLIB, Jasper or Pentaho. In the dawn of the IT industry when IT apes were breaking each others skulls with the bones of dead animals (my apologies to Stanley Kubrick), there were programming languages like COBOL and RPG which have both had more powerful report generating capabilities than Perl has today. When the black monolith landed, there was a tool called RPT/RPF, which has worked with Oracle 5 and Oracle 6. That tool has also had much more report writing capabilities than Perl. Perl is a lousy excuse for a report writing tool and you need something better. However, Perl is a great scripting language which results in neat, clean and understandable scripts and can be used as a glue between Oracle and OS. In contrast with shell, Perl has very decent mechanisms for working with arrays, both integer-based and associative, it has excellent file handling mechanisms, signal handling, argument parsing and debugging capabilities, far beyond the level of any shell. Above all other, programming in Perl is fun. Programming shell scripts is working on the chain gang.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
The Oracle Whisperer
http://mgogala.byethost5.com