sqlplus

Recently I am involved in a project which requires a lot of data to be extracted from Oracle. The size of the data was so huge that the filesystems filled up. Compressing the output (using tar j (bzip2) or z (gzip)) is an obvious solution, but this can only be done after the files are created. This is why I proposed compressing the output without ever existing in uncompressed form.

This solution works with a so called ‘named pipe’, which is something for which I know for sure it can be done on Linux and unix. A named pipe has the ability to let two processes transfer data between each other. This solution will look familiar to “older” Oracle DBA’s: this was how exports where compressed from the “original” export utility (exp).

I’ve created a small script which calls sqlplus embedded in it, and executes sqlplus commands using a “here command”:

This post is nothing new, and I created it after a little discussion on twitter about how to use readline support in SQL*Plus. The idea is not new, and I have compiled and used rlwrap for quite some time.

At the time, Frits Hoogland asked me why I didn’t use the EPEL package-and I had to admit to myself that I didn’t know the Extra Package for Enterprise Linux repository at all. But there is more to rlwrap and Linux I didn’t know, but first things first.

Installing rlwrap from EPEL

This is really simple-you can either add the EPEL repository to your /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory or simply download the rlwrap package and install it via RPM. A simple wget on your host does the trick. You can set environment variables when you’d like to use a proxy as shown here: