use Perl

• There are alternatives to SQL*Plus (Score:1)

  by wnodom (2030)

  Are you hearing me Oracle? You command line client is awful. It sucks very, very hard. Yes, you have all of these neat features that are very useful, but for grunts like me, I want a tool that makes the common tasks easy. Give me autocompletion. Give me a friggin' up arrow. Give me a break.

  I agree so hard it hurts. That's why I use TOAD [toadsoft.com].
  • Re:There are alternatives to SQL*Plus (Score:2)

    by djberg96 (2603)

    And for those who can't afford TOAD, there's TORA [sf.net]. Though, be warned, Henrik (the author) has gone and joined Quest Software (the makers of TOAD), so TORA is unmaintained atm.
    • Re:There are alternatives to SQL*Plus (Score:2)

      by Ovid (2709)

      I tried TOra twice. The first time it wouldn't install. The second time it would launch and then throw a bunch of error messages. I was most disappointed by this.
      • Re:There are alternatives to SQL*Plus (Score:2)

        by djberg96 (2603)

        Use the 1.3.x branch. I think I had to tweak the config file for Solaris, though. I use it without problems on Solaris 9.
• dbish (Score:2)

  by schwern (1528)

  I remember thinking the same thing... six years ago! You could try the same thing I tried back then, DBI::Shell [cpan.org]?
  • Seen it, still use sqlplus (Score:1)

    by btilly (5037)

    There are error messages (like which line of SQL had a problem) which I get with sqlplus but not through DBI. For me that is a critical feature, since I'm generally not trying to interactively understand Oracle through the command line, but rather I'm trying to debug some SQL that is misbehaving (eg a large hunk of sql refuses to compile).
    
    Oracle's error messages suck nearly as badly as its command line client, and I see no reason to make them suck any worse than they have to.
• Emacs (Score:1)

  by jplindstrom (594)

  I think I remember that you use vi, but Emacs has an Oracle mode that's better than SQL Plus. If you use etags on the DDL files, you get command completion on tables and fields etc.
  • Re:Emacs (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    Yes, I do use vi, but that sounds like one heck of a feature!