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Oracle in a Nutshell
book

Oracle in a Nutshell

by Rick Greenwald, David C. Kreines
December 2002
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
928 pages
85h 29m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Oracle in a Nutshell

Entering SQL*Plus commands

Commands such as DESCRIBE, COLUMN, TTITLE, SET, and all the others listed in the “Commands” section are commands to SQL*Plus itself. These must be entered on one line and are executed immediately after you enter them. For example:

SET ECHO ON
DESCRIBE employee

SQL*Plus commands may optionally be terminated by a semicolon. For example:

PROMPT This semicolon won't print.;
CONNECT system/manager;

You can change this behavior of SQL*Plus toward semicolons by changing the SQLTERMINATOR setting.

Long SQL*Plus commands may be continued onto multiple physical lines. The SQL*Plus continuation character is a hyphen (-). Use it at the end of a physical line to continue a long SQL*Plus command to the next line. The following three lines, for example, are treated as one by SQL*Plus:

COLUMN employee_id -
FORMAT 099999 -
HEADING 'Emp ID'

The space in front of the continuation character is optional. Quoted strings may also be continued. For example:

SELECT 'Hello-
World!' FROM dual;

When you are continuing a quoted string, any spaces before the continuation character will be included in the string. The line break also counts as one space.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596003366Errata Page