productive.dk

I just found gqlplus today when looking for a way to enable command-line history in the SQL*Plus command that comes with Oracle’s Instant Client:

gqlplus is a drop-in replacement for sqlplus, an Oracle SQL client, for UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. The difference between gqlplus and sqlplus is command-line editing and history, plus table-name and column-name completion. As you know if you have used sqlplus, it is notoriously difficult to correct typing errors and other mistakes in your SQL statements. sqlplus does give you ability to use external editor to edit a statement, but only the last statement you typed. gqlplus solves this problem by providing the familiar command-line editing and history as in tcsh or bash shells, and table/column-name completion, while otherwise retaining compatibility with sqlplus.

To install on OS X, simply download, untar and do the usual configure/make ritual, with --disable-shared passed to configure (see this page for details but note that it’s no longer necessary to patch gqlplus):

$ ./configure --disable-shared
$ make

and then move the binary to /usr/local/bin. You may want to pass -d to gqlplus, to disable column-name completion, as it can take quite a while to load the meta data required, but otherwise gqlplus is truly a joy to use.

Update 2009-03-10:
If you want to substitute all calls to sqlplus with gqlplus, add an alias to your .profile (or .bash_profile):

alias sqlplus='gqlplus'    # with auto-completion 
alias sqlplus='gqlplus -d' # without auto-completion

Reading In Praise of the Zune? over at MacUser, the last paragraph really cracked me up:

That’s right, the Cult of Mac is advocating a product that Mac users can’t even use. I hear next week they’re doing a special on anti-virus apps. I hear that OS X version of Norton AntiVirus is really the pits. It never finds anything.