Posts Tagged ‘SQL*Plus Environment’

Customize your SQL*Plus Environment

February 13th, 2009 No Comments   Posted in Uncategorized

The setup for SQL*Plus is amazingly easy. In fact, it should already be done. Every client software installation has it, and every server installation has it too. On windows, there are two versions of SQL*Plus: a GUI one (the sqlplusw.exe program) and a character based one (the sqlplus.exe program). The character-mode SQL*Plus is 100% compatible with SQL*Plus on every other platform on which Oracle is delivered. The GUI SQL*Plus, which offers no real functional benefit over the character mode – after all, it is a character-mode tool running in a window – is different enough to be confusing and isn’t flexible as the command-line version. Additionally, it is already officially deprecated in the next release of Oracle, so it won’t be around for long.

Store Settings for SQL*PLUS (login.sql and glogin.sql)

glogin.sql

Whenever SQL*PLUS starts up, it looks for a file named glogin.sql under the directory $ORACLE_HOME/sqlplus/admin. If such a file is found, it is read and the containing statements executed. This allows to store settings (such as linesize) accross SQL*PLUS sessions. New in Oracle 10g: Oracle also reads glogin.sql and login.sql at a connect in sql*plus.

login.sql

Additionally, after reading glogin.sql, sql*plus also looks for a file named login.sql in the directory from where SQL*PLUS was started and in the directory that the environment variable SQLPATH points to and reads it and executes it. Settings from the login.sql take precedence over settings from glogin.sql.

In addition to the standard items in my glogin.sql file I added the following:

-- Define a custom prompt

define gname=idle
column global_name new_value gname
select lower(user) || '@' ||
       substr( global_name, 1, decode( dot,
                                       0, length(global_name),
                                          dot-1) ) global_name
  from (select global_name, instr(global_name,'.') dot
          from global_name );
set sqlprompt '&gname> '

This give me a SQL*Plus prompt that show me the database name I am connected to as well as what user I am connected as. This helps eliminate the confusion of dealing with multiple users on multiple instances. The other piece of code I have added is:

-- Start logging all scripts

define logname=date
column clogname new_value logname
select substr(global_name,1,
 decode(dot,0,length(global_name),dot-1))||'-'||
 to_char(sysdate, 'yyyymmddhh24miss')||'-'||
round(dbms_random.value(10,99),0) clogname
from (select global_name, instr(global_name, '.')
dot from global_name);
spool c:\sqlpluslogs\&logname..txt

This starts a log file for my entire session. The spool filename is generated randomly. The log file name is generated with the date, database name, and for uniqueness a random number. The random number is not really needed since I am using the date down to the seconds, but I added it just to be safe.


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