SQLPlus-Mode for Emacs

Recently I had to get some data from the Oracle E-Business Suite and it turned out that I needed some more or less complex SQL to accomplish the task. When I was nearly finished, Oracle SQLDeveloper crashed. Boom - all was gone. I was very angry. Being an Emacs-fan, I thought how difficult it would be to have some basic functionality in Emacs. The features I wanted were just 1) Edit SQL in a buffer, 2) send this SQL to SQLPlus and 3) view the output nicely formatted in another buffer.

I knew I could start SQLPlus in a shell-buffer, but the output from a select would look just like so:



Hm. Not very useful. How can one tell SQLPlus to use just the minimum space for each column? One can't. Each column must be tailored individually.

Then I looked at several Emacs-modes out there for SQLPlus. Most of them did not install right away or screwed up based on my data (OK, data from the Oracle EBS is insane - you would not see tables with so many columns anywhere else - but still it is perfectly legal). I tried to fix the problems, but could not - the elisp-code was just too much for me. Damn it, most of these modes try to emulate whole IDEs!

So, that was not what I wanted. So I rolled my own. The result is quite usable for me. Here is a screen-shot:


In the buffer above you can enter SQL and send it with Ctrl-Enter (anywhere in the paragraph) to SQLPlus, the result appears nicely formatted in the lower buffer. When you first type Ctrl-Enter, a buffer appears in which you have to start SQLPLus and log on to Oracle. sqlplus-2-mode interacts with this buffer behind the scenes. Results from SQLPlus are displayed in the buffer *sqlplus-2-output*. Only the first few rows (this is configurable) are displayed - after all, this is not a reporting-tool.

Now, I can concentrate on the SQL and fear no more crashes - finally!

You can get the mode here. I assume that you know how to set up an emacs-mode, so I will not explain it here. There are still a few problems to be solved (long-running statements are not handled well) - once that is solved, I will write end-user-friendly documentation. Right now it is just a quick hack :-)