History of SQL*Plus
SQL*Plus has been around for a long time, pretty much since the beginning of Oracle. In fact, the original author was Bruce Scott. Any DBA will recognize the name Scott. It lives on, immortalized as the owner of the demo tables that are installed with every version of Oracle. The original purpose of SQL*Plus can be summed up in the succinct words of Kirk Bradley, another early author of SQL*Plus, who told me, “We needed a way to enter statements into the database and get results.”
This is still arguably the major reason most people use SQL*Plus today, over fifteen years after it was originally written. SQL*Plus certainly satisfies a compelling, and enduring, need.
The original name of the product was not SQL*Plus. The original name was UFI, which stands for User Friendly Interface. This name has its roots in one of the first relational database systems ever developed, IBM’s System R. System R was the product of a research effort by IBM. Some of IBM’s documents referred to the command-line interface as the User Friendly Interface, and that name was adopted by Oracle for their interactive SQL utility.
One of the more interesting uses Oracle had for UFI was as a tool to produce their documentation. The DOCUMENT command, now considered obsolete, was used for this purpose. Script files were created that contained the manual text, interspersed with the SQL statements needed for the examples. The DOCUMENT command was used to set off the manual text so that it would ...