Forum OpenACS Q&A: Tips to get newbie Oracle Developer up to speed?

1: Tips to get newbie Oracle Developer up to speed?

Posted by Ola Hansson on 02/18/03 03:39 PM

I am new to developing on Oracle so what I'm about to ask in this thread may sound a little, um, trivial... Please bear with me.

In PG I'm used to writing "\d table_name" to view the definition of a table, and "\dt acs" to list all tables that begin with "acs" in the db.

I've found that "describe" does the former in Oracle, but isn't there a shorthand for it?

I'd be very interested in hearing more about this kind of little DBA "tricks".

Also, when I write a command in SQLPLUS (in Gnome terminal 2.2.1) and want to repeat it without retyping the whole shebang, the up-arrow won't give me the command history. Instead I get garbage characters... Is there a environment variable that I'll have to set or something in order to get this to work?

/Ola

2: Re: Tips to get newbie Oracle Developer up to speed? (response to 1)

Posted by Brad Duell on 02/18/03 03:55 PM

For me, there are a few things that come in very handy.

1. sql mode in emacs. That'll let you copy and paste your commands.

2. Schema browsers like either DBA Studio from Oracle, or TORA

3. selecting from user_tables will get you what you need wrt the table name (i.e. select table_name from user_tables where table_name like 'ACS%').

4. desc is short for describe.

Good luck.

3: Re: Tips to get newbie Oracle Developer up to speed? (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 02/18/03 04:01 PM

I recommend for oracle and postgresql:

M-x sql-oracle or M-x sql-postgres from inside emacs. It openacs SQLPLUS or psql in a sql mode buffer.

4: Re: Tips to get newbie Oracle Developer up to speed? (response to 3)

Posted by mark dalrymple on 02/18/03 04:14 PM

I've got a cheesy little Knowledgebase, including 70 some odd oracle items.

5: Re: Tips to get newbie Oracle Developer up to speed? (response to 4)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 02/19/03 04:17 PM

If you really don't like sqlplus (can't imagine why 😉 ) there are a few drop-in replacement tools. gqlplus is one. See http://gqlplus.sourceforge.net/