Re: Oracle 10g Express - any danger for Postgres?

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 01:25:31PM -0600, James Thompson wrote:
> > Yes, sqlplus looks especially bad once you're used to banging around
> > in psql. Although, I recently discovered rlwrap (a generic readline
> > wrapper) which makes sqlplus almost tolerable. It's the best thing to
> > happen to sqlplus since... well, since "quit" I suppose.
>
> I just wish pgsql had something similar to sqlplus's built in formatting tools
> for output. Being able to set titles, row lengths, and breaks made sqlplus a
> very nice reporting tool. A rather large majority of "reports" at my old job
> consisted of sqlplus commands to set the format output, and a sql statement
> redirected to our line printer.
>
> I haven't used Oracle since the mid 90s so I don't have a working example but
> a description of some of the commands can be found here
>
> http://www.siue.edu/~dbock/cmis564/otext3.htm

Given the choice, I'd *MUCH* rather have a good, easy-to-use CLI than a
reporting tool. I'm not a GUI person, so I always hate working with
Oracle and MSSQL in that regard. Of course db2's CLI is just horrid, but
luckily it's easy to just substitute your shell for it's editing
features, ie:

db2 'select * from table'
db2 'update ...'

Believe it or not it very quickly becomes second nature to wrap
everything in db2 '', so it's not nearly as bad as you'd think.

In any case, how much user demand is there for a reporting tool for
PostgreSQL? Either a seperate tool or better functionality in psql. My
guess is that this isn't something that interests most of the
developers, so the only way it's going to happen is if a lot of users
speak up and ask for it. Of course speaking up with patches is far
better.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461