How to display table data more clearly in oracle sqlplus

Question

I want to be able to display the resulting data from a select in a pretty way, not all columns under others.

Here is the way sqlplus displays my table data:

But I want to show them as:

Name   |    Address    |    Phone    |
-------+---------------+-------------+
name1  |    address1   |    phone1   |
name2  |    address2   |    phone2   |
name3  |    address3   |    phone3   |

Not each column under the other

Solution 1

I usually start with something like:

set lines 256
set trimout on
set tab off

Have a look at help set if you have the help information installed. And then select name,address rather than select * if you really only want those two columns.

Solution 2

If you mean you want to see them like this:

WORKPLACEID NAME       ADDRESS        TELEPHONE
----------- ---------- -------------- ---------
          1 HSBC       Nugegoda Road      43434
          2 HNB Bank   Colombo Road      223423

then in SQL Plus you can set the column widths like this (for example):

column name format a10
column address format a20
column telephone format 999999999

You can also specify the line size and page size if necessary like this:

set linesize 100 pagesize 50

You do this by typing those commands into SQL Plus before running the query. Or you can put these commands and the query into a script file e.g. myscript.sql and run that. For example:

column name format a10
column address format a20
column telephone format 999999999

select name, address, telephone
from mytable;

Solution 3

You can set the line size as per the width of the window and set wrap off using the following command.

set linesize 160;
set wrap off;

I have used 160 as per my preference you can set it to somewhere between 100 - 200 and setting wrap will not your data and it will display the data properly.

Solution 4

In case you have a dump made with sqlplus and the output is garbled as someone did not set those 3 values before, there's a way out.

Just a couple hours ago DB admin send me that ugly looking output of query executed in sqlplus (I dunno, maybe he hates me...). I had to find a way out: this is an awk script to parse that output to make it at least more readable. It's far not perfect, but I did not have enough time to polish it properly. Anyway, it does the job quite well.

awk ' function isDashed(ln){return ln ~ /^---+/};function addLn(){ln2=ln1; ln1=ln0;ln0=$0};function isLoaded(){return l==1||ln2!=""}; function printHeader(){hdr=hnames"\n"hdash;if(hdr!=lastHeader){lastHeader=hdr;print hdr};hnames="";hdash=""};function isHeaderFirstLn(){return isDashed(ln0) && !isDashed(ln1) && !isDashed(ln2) }; function isDataFirstLn(){return isDashed(ln2)&&!isDashed(ln1)&&!isDashed(ln0)}                         BEGIN{_d=1;h=1;hnames="";hdash="";val="";ln2="";ln1="";ln0="";fheadln=""}                                 { addLn();  if(!isLoaded()){next}; l=1;             if(h==1){if(!isDataFirstLn()){if(_d==0){hnames=hnames" "ln1;_d=1;}else{hdash=hdash" "ln1;_d=0}}else{_d=0;h=0;val=ln1;printHeader()}}else{if(!isHeaderFirstLn()){val=val" "ln1}else{print val;val="";_d=1;h=1;hnames=ln1}}   }END{if(val!="")print val}'

In case anyone else would like to try improve this script, below are the variables: hnames -- column names in the header, hdash - dashed below the header, h -- whether I'm currently parsing header (then ==1), val -- the data, _d - - to swap between hnames and hdash, ln0 - last line read, ln1 - line read previously (it's the one i'm actually working with), ln2 - line read before ln1

Happy parsing!

Oh, almost forgot... I use this to prettify sqlplus output myself:

[oracle@ora ~]$ cat prettify_sql 
set lines 256
set trimout on
set tab off
set pagesize 100
set colsep " | "

colsep is optional, but it makes output look like sqlite which is easier to parse using scripts.

EDIT: A little preview of parsed and non-parsed output

View more solutions

Comments

[Nubkadiya]

errr.. i want to show them just like a normal table. one after another one

[APC]

Also we would probably want to SET PAGESIZE 200 (say) in order to reduce the repetition of the column headings in a big resultset.

[Nubkadiya]

so this should done during the table creation or can you please elobarate more on this

[Alex Poole]

@user206168 - the question was about SQL*Plus. Can you expand on what doesn't work?

[Caffeinated]

What's the point of the set space 1 and the set tab off ?

[Alex Poole]

@Coffee - I set tab off so it pads things with spaces instead of tab characters; doesn't matter on-screen but if the output is put in a file then it can have odd effects, if tab widths aren't the same. set space 1 is redundant though; space is obsolete for start, and it defaults to 1 anyway; but it's the equivalent of set colsep ' '. I think I've carried this from a really old environment that defaulted to three spaces between columns, and I just preferred one.

[Felipe Alvarez]

lines and pages NEVER worked for me. Using column is easy, and fantastic. Thanks