I was very surprised how pure the Oracle’s command line utility SQL*Plus. Comparing with mysql it lack history, completion and doesn’t allow even edit query. To fix that the utility rlwrap can be used. I installed it via yum under Fedora 11 and run like that:
rlwrap sqlplus db_user@db
To have auto-complete feature you should find file SQL.dict somewhere (drop the comment, please, if you know the place). It contains SQL keywords, functions and commands. The command to run SQL*Plus will be following in that case:
rlwrap -b "" -f $HOME/sql.dict sqlplus db_user@db
To make our life easier we can create an alias in the .bash_profile or .profile:
alias mysqlplus='rlwrap -b "" -f $HOME/sql.dict sqlplus'
There is an another interesting improvement for Linux users – using VIM as default editor of SQL*Plus. I didn’t try it practically yet.
[via Oracle Online]
