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Comment by herewulf | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. If I were still working with Oracle, I'd love to see a sqlplus replacement. It has to be one of the most braindead CLIs ever, yet is too often instrumental to getting some actual work done with the shell et al.

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I doubt that it's going to happen. People working with Oracle are generally not the kind that would start Open Source projects. If they are, also generally, they won't work with Oracle for long.

Thankfully there are exceptions. Not everyone is trying to be hip. When one needs to build seriously bullet proof, robust systems which must handle extreme amounts of data and do it very fast, Oracle database in RAC configuration is the way to go, and a CLI SQL client is the tool to get there.

Is there a good Oracle CLI client available somewhere, then?

Possibly, but I’m still stuck automating using SQL*Plus. If it just had libreadline [CURSOR UP] history functionality, it would be really powerful (the official documentation on it is 600+ pages). pgsql and Vertica databases don’t need any more client enhancements, but the one database which does doesn’t get one. Talk about a missed market opportunity!

Use rlwrap as another commenter mentioned.

You're assuming that most DBA's or companies using Oracle would pay for more powerful CLI. In my experience with Oracle DBA's, most just use SQLDeveloper.

Can't use SQLDeveloper to automate, because you can't call a Java GUI to run SQL and PL/SQL code inside of an OS package postinstall since it has to run in a headless environment. And if you're automating that way, you want a powerful command line SQL client while you're automating, otherwise it's a pain in the ass to switch back and forth.

There is one! It works acceptably http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sqlcl/over...

Please try usql:

    go get -u -tags oracle github.com/xo/usql

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