Thursday, 8 August 2013

SQL*Plus and useful settings

SQL*Plus has a plenty of settings, but there are few really useful for me.
For formatting the output
  • PAGESIZE - this controls the numbers of rows displayed between displaying headers. Usually I set it to 1000 (which means that I have got headers only once) and for some scripts for 0 (which means no headers at all)
  • LINESIZE - this controls the line width in characters in which a row is fit in. Default 80 fits to default terminal settings. The best shape of data for me is the model 1 row per line, so I often modify this to get such result
  • TRIMOUT - for cutting off unnecessary spaces filling lines
  • COL FOR a - for formatting character columns
  • COL FOR 999999 - for formatting number columns
  • LONG - for setting how much of LOBs to show on the display - very useful especially with DBMS_METADATA.GET_DDL calls
  • HEAD - for turning on and off the headers - important for scripts, when we want some values from within the database - then sqlplus -s /nolog with CONNECT command


For testing purposes
  • FEEDBACK - for turning on and off a message at the end of display summarizing the number of affected rows or PL/SQL command status (SUCCESS|FAILURE)
  • TIME - enables time in sqlprompt, which may be used as a marker for script performance
  • TIMING - returns information about performance time for operations


For scripts creating scripts
  • SQLPROMPT - cool for identifying terminals, when one works on plenty of environments (especially when some of them are production ones), but even cooler as "---> " when it comes to the creation of SQL scripts - prompt messages in the spool are seen as comments


For executing scripts
  • TERMOUT - this works only if one calls commands from underlying script - very important for long-running scripts with plenty of output with enabled spooling, when on terminal output we need only command and information about success or error messages.
  • SPOOL - for logging
  • TRIMSPOOL - useful especially with connection to wide LINESIZE - in order to remove unnecessary spaces (with them logs become very large)
  • SERVEROUTPUT - for turning on|off printing from PL/SQL to screen
  • ECHO - turns on|off the lines with replaced &variables

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