I couldn't find a similar question here.
I have a PRO*C program named pro_c.pc. How can I call and execute this in a piece of PL/SQL code?! Could someone give me a simple example?!
You can link external libraries (Windows DLL or UNIX ".so" files) to Oracle and then make them callable via PLSQL. This has been around at least since Oracle 8i.
This though requires DBA privs on the server to set this up, and is probably not a recommended approach these days .... but useful for crunching huge data.
See here for more details.
Calling a actual program directly, as opposed to a library function from PLSQL would be done indirectly via DBMS_SCHEDULER as #Justin suggested as the easiest way, creating a program with the PROGRAM_TYPE as EXECUTABLE. See here for more info.
A couple of things to note when doing this, the program will run as the (assuming UNIX) "oracle" user - bringing with it some security considerations, e.g. if the program creates a file it will be created as owned by oracle, and so might not be accessible to an "application" user. The program will run on the Oracle database server.
I have a question regarding Automation.In my project we have 35 SQL scripts with same logic,same scripts for all those, with only 4 parameters different how can i automate these in TOAD for Oracle?
Depending on your version of Toad, there could be a 'Automation Designer' under the 'Utilities' menu item. This will allow you to run scripts automatically, based on a bit of logic. It also supports running with parameters.
The tool 'Toad for Data Analysts' can also be used to model automated scripts, and run them with specific parameters.
If you have any of these tools available, I would suggest giving them a try, or at least read up on their documentation. If you don't have access to these, let me know so I can try and think of a different solution.
As part of a release we run a load of PL/SQL scripts against a database. Recently someone left the ; off the end of a line in one script that was called another script so this meant that script did not get run. Because this did not cause an error, it just didn't get run, it took quite a while to track down what had happened.
I want to check the scripts before they are run for lines in them that are missing either a ; at the end or a / on the line after. This is made more complicated as 'lines' in the script could actually span more than one line if it is statement or block of code.
To me this seems like to do this I'm going to have to parse the scripts then check they meet the above.
I've found ANTLR and wonder if this might be a way to do it since there seem to be existing PL/SQL grammars but looks like that's going to be a step learning curve for what's just a simple check.
Does anyone know an easy way or any other tools, eclipse plugins etc that I can use to check for lines in the scripts that are missing either a ; at the end or a / on the line after?
Update
We already do most of the stuff Tom H suggested. The scripts are run into our test server and we have a version table that gets updated at the end. The problem was that the missing semi-colon in the container script meant one script did not get run but the rest including the one to update the version number ran without errors. Therefore the problem only got picked up quite a way into testing. This needed the database restored before running the scripts with the missing semi-colon added so basically resulted in half a day of testing time being lost. If there was a simple way to check this before running the scripts into the test server it could save quite a bit of time.
I agree with MattH that you may be going about this the wrong way. I would just add an insert statement to the end of all of your scripts which insert a "version" row into a table in the database. At the end of your deployment scripts it's then an easy task to check that the version table has all of the correct rows in it.
Also, you should have all of your release scripts being run exactly as they will be in production against your QA server. That's where all of the testing takes place. You never do anything to the server besides what is in your release steps - you only run the release scripts and if those release scripts are ever changed then you refresh the QA server with them and redo testing.
When you go to production your release process has then been fully tested. As a fail safe measure you can also use tools like Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare to check that production matches the QA server. The data compare would only be against certain tables (look-up tables, etc.). If you have data changes to major tables (1M rows, etc.) then you can right a custom script to check that they are correct.
Even if the scripts are different for every release (and not part of a defined source control structure that creates or replaces database objects) I would adopt a practice of breaking the scripts down into the most fundamental units of work per file and deploying them through Ant with the standard sql task. You probably have these types of scripts:
CREATE or REPLACE dbobject...
SQL DML scripts
Anonymous PL/SQL blocks
If you standardize on a consistent statement delimiter (I suggest using "/" since it works with all of the cases above) and set the deployment to fail on error, then Ant will either deploy all of the files or indicate why it couldn't.
I think it would be very difficult to otherwise parse files of one or more SQL and/or PLSQL statements and find missing delimiters if there are no standards on delimiter choice or statements per file.
Just a thought, but are you going about this the wrong way?
I assume, at the file-level, the lack of a semi colon in the file was not a problem? but it only became a problem when run via the batch processing? If that's the case maybe you can change your batch processing to cope with this.
If it was the file, then testing should have picked it up. You don't want to parse your input files to make sure they compile etc.
I am part of a software development company looking for a good way to update my SQL Server tables when I put out a new version of the software. I know the answer is to probably use scripts in one form or another.
I am considering writing my own .NET program that runs the scripts to make it a bit easier and more user-friendly. I was wondering if there are any tools out there along those lines. Any input would be appreciated.
Suggest you look at Red_gate's SQlCompare
What kind of product are you using for your software installation? Products like InstallShield often now include SQL steps as an option for part of your install script.
Otherwise, you could look at using isql/osql to run your script from the command line through a batch file.
One of the developers where I'm currently consulting wrote a rather nifty SQL installer. I'll ask him when he gets in how he went about it.
I am using Red Gate's SQL Compare all the time. Also you need to make sure to provide a rollback script in case you need to go back to the previous version.
Have a look at DB Ghost Packager Plus.
Packages your source database and the compare and sync engine into a simple EXE for deployment. The installer EXE will automatically update any target schema to match the source on-the-fly at installation time.
Red Gate's SQL Compare to generate the change script, and Red Gate's Multi Script to easily send it to multiple SQL databases at the same time.
I am not a fan of using SQL*PLUS as an interface to Oracle. I usually use yasql, but it hasn't been updated since 2005 and can do with some improvements. A quick Google search shows yasql and SQLPal. I am using linux, so SQLPal is not an option.
Are there any alternatives out there, or am I stuck with an interface that I do not like or one that is no longer maintained?
I presume that you want a low-overhead method of knocking out queries, but want more functions than SQL*Plus provides? Why not use Oracle's SQL Developer? It's free.
Install, make a new connection to your database, then just start typing a script. Press F5 to run it (or just the part of the script that you've highlighted).
Take a look at gqlplus. It wraps sql*plus on linux and makes it more user-friendly by adding things like command history, table name completion and so on.
Emacs can provide so much more powerful text editing features and functionality beyond the default SQL*Plus command-line interface.
Here are a few links on how to use Emacs as a wrapper for SQL*Plus:
Emacs and Oracle
EmacsWiki:SqlPlus
TOAD is pretty expensive, but you can download a 90-day trial from the Quest site to see if it's got the feature set you want (don't be fooled by the "freeware" title - it's only free for 90 days, and then it expires, which definitely makes it shareware):
http://www.toadworld.com/Freeware/ToadforOracleFreeware/tabid/558/Default.aspx
Another options is a tool I've seen on CodeProject:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/OQuery.aspx
It's in .NET, so you'd have to see if it compiled on Mono, but it might be worth a shot. I haven't used either tool (Toad or this one), since I'm a SQL Server guy, but I've heard good things about Toad.
If it's command-line you want, I'd recommend rlwrap to go with sqlplus; it gives you line-editing capabilities and command history, making sqlplus a somewhat usable tool.
You could try PL/SQL developer from allroundautomations, there is a trial available and the price is much lower than TOAD.
Regards
K
Take a look at Senora. This tool is written in Perl and therefore is cross platform. Also Senora is free, extensible and intends to be your primary Oracle shell. You can extend Senora easily by providing you own plugins. Senora attempts to provide a friendlier output formatting than sqlplus. Columns tend to be only as wide a really needed.
Another interesting alternative is SQLcl. It provides in-line editing, statement completion, command recall, DBA stuff (e.g. startup, shutdown) and also supporting your previously written SQL*Plus scripts.
It depends what you are looking for.
If it is a GUI query tool, then Oracle have their free SQL Developer product (though it has a hefty footprint). There's a few free cross-database ones too. I like SQUirrel SQL client myself. There's also DBVisualiser and a few others.
JEdit is an editor that has a DBConsole plugin for running database queries and DML/DDL.
They are all java based so run most places.
If you like a command line, check out sqlpython (the developer has identified a couple of others too)
I like SQL Developer. It's free, has an intuitive UI, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It also supports many sql*plus commands and supports version control
Apparently Oracle itself has phased out sql*plus and replaced it with SQLcl, which supports more modern features such as history, formatting, etc: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqlcl.html.
open source version of TOAD is TORA:
tora.sourceforge.net
If you're the VIM type kind of guy then I'd look into Vorax. It is basically a VIM wrapper around SQL*plus.
Have used both Toad & SQL Navigator, and I love the stability SQL Navigator has.
i like sqlsh
alias sqr='sqlsh -d DBI:Oracle:MYSERVER.COM -u USER -p PASSWORD'
toad from quest software if you can pay for a license
sql squirrel if you can't.
I used my own tool ocimlsh in conjunction with rlwrap.
I just use socat to add readline support to sqlplus. History and a working backspace key actually turn sqlplus into a pretty decent tool.
In my .bashrc:
function sqlplus {
socat READLINE,history=$HOME/.sqlplus_history EXEC:"$ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus $(echo $# | sed 's/\([\:]\)/\\\1/g')",pty,setsid,ctty
status=$?
}
You might see alternatives that alias sqlplus to socat, but you will quickly discover that doing so prevents you from invoking sqlplus with its various command line options.
CAVEAT: Be sure to set $HOME/.sqlplus_history permissions to 0600. Passwords that you type end up in the history file. You might also consider adding cat /dev/null > $HOME/.sqlplus_history to your .bash_logout.