Oracle SQL*Plus: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 11. Customizing Your SQL*Plus Environment

This chapter will show you how you can modify the SQL*Plus environment in order to make things more convenient for you or for the users you support. There are a number of settings that can be customized. Some, like the search path used for SQL scripts, are more useful than others. In addition, there are two SQL scripts that are automatically run whenever you start SQL*Plus. These SQL scripts are useful, for example, if you have specific SET commands that you always want to execute at the beginning of a session.

SQL*Plus Settings You Can Control

The specific customizations you can make may vary a bit depending on the operating system and the specific version of SQL*Plus you are using. Generally, though, there are two types of things you need to be aware of: the login scripts and the environment variable settings.

There are two SQL scripts that are executed whenever SQL*Plus starts up. The first script is referred to as the site profile , and is named glogin.sql. It applies globally to all users on a particular computer. The second script is the user profile (not the same thing as the product user profile discussed in Chapter 9), and it is named login.sql. As you can guess from the name, each user may have his or her own user profile script. The most obvious use for these files is to execute SET commands to customize the environment settings to something other than their defaults.

There are several operating-system environment ...