Oracle Database Foundations

9.2. Report Formatting

While a DBA or an application developer who is familiar with the data can interpret terse column names such as MGR_NO and ST_ID, these column names may not be very intuitive for employees in the Accounting department. Similarly, consider a query like this:

select last_name from employees
    where department_id = 80;

Its output does not make it clear that the query output is only for the Sales department, unless you have all the department numbers memorized!

Reports generated from SQL queries are much more readable and understandable when you use descriptive column names and report headers and footers. The added features of the iSQL*Plus, SQL*Plus, and SQL*Plus Worksheet environment provide this functionality.

In this section, ...