SQL*Plus alternatives (at InOUG)

I spoke last Thursday at the Indiana Oracle Users Group on "The Command Line Lives: SQL*Plus and Alternatives".

I still need to get the full, S5 format presentation posted somewhere; for now, you can see the raw text of the presentation here.

It's an interesting topic, and one I'd like to get drawn more deeply into. Some nice things have been done in producing open-source command-line alternatives to SQL*Plus, including

• gqlplus
• Senora
• YASQL
• sqlpython

Unfortunately, the only one whose development currently seems to be active is sqlpython, and there's just me and Luca Canali working on that. I've just added functionality to sqlpython to let it fail over to sessions of the other tools (when "set failover true" is issued; doesn't work on Windows). That way, the exciting features of Senora and YASQL can be used from within sqlpython, instead of trying to remember which tool has which feature. It's quirky, though, since a full-fledged independent session of each tool is actually maintained "under the covers".

I'm dreaming of expanding sqlpython to the point where it incorporates all Senora and YASQL's features natively. Tragically, my dreams cannot yet be downloaded from the Cheese Shop.