Simon Krenger

Ok, here is a quick trick that I just found out about earlier this week. I am currently in an Oracle Database 11g: Administration 11 course and learn many new things about database administration.

One thing you will definitely encounter when working with Linux is that it is not possible to scroll back though your SQL*Plus history with the arrow keys. If you try to do so, the following happens:

SQL> select owner, count(1) from dba_tables group by owner;

OWNER				 COUNT(1)
------------------------------ ----------
[..]
SYS				      673
SIMON				       88


7 rows selected.

SQL> ^[[A     " - rest of line ignored.
SQL> command "
SQL> 

Argh! Some kind of wild character sequence appears on the command line. A quick search shows that this is a common problem. One thing that regularly happens is that you enter a SELECT statement that returns too many rows. Because the terminal buffer only contains a certain number of rows, your query disappears and you have to retype it.