Oracle usernames and passwords will be allocated to each group (i.e. pair of students) via the Fire system. This information will be sent manually, so there could a a delay of a day or two before you get the account information, so please request your Oracle account in good time.
There is a web-based interface to Oracle: iSQL*Plus
You can also use Oracle via the command-line program SQL*Plus.
UNIX_PROMPT> sqlplus
SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Fri Oct 31 10:53:06 2008
Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Enter user-name: username@db.student.chalmers.se
Enter password:
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
SQL> exit;
Disconnected from Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
UNIX_PROMPT>
You can change your Oracle password by executing the command:
ALTER USER <userName> IDENTIFIED BY <newPassword>;
where <userName> is your Oracle username, and <newPassword> is the password you would like to use in the future. This command, like all other SQL commands, should be terminated with a semicolon.
Note that SQL is completely case-insensitive. You can use upper case or lower case for keywords like ALTER. Even your password is case insensitive. We tend to use upper case keywords and not other things.
To execute commands stored in a file, type
@<file.sql>
(where <file.sql> is your file) at the command prompt. All commands stored in <file.sql> will be executed by sqlplus.
The system keeps information about your schema in certain system tables. The most important for now is USER_TABLES. You can recall the names of your tables by issuing the query:
SELECT TABLE_NAME
FROM USER_TABLES;
More information about your tables is available from USER_TABLES. To see all the attributes of USER_TABLES, try:
SELECT *
FROM USER_TABLES;
It is also possible to recall the attributes of a table once you know its name. Issue the command:
DESCRIBE <tableName>;
to learn about the attributes of relation <tableName>.
The following script can be run in SQL*Plus to delete all of your tables, views and triggers:
begin
for c in (select table_name from user_tables) loop
execute immediate ('drop table '||c.table_name||' cascade constraints');
end loop;
end;
/
begin
for c in (select * from user_objects) loop
execute immediate ('drop '||c.object_type||' '||c.object_name);
end loop;
end;
/
When using iSQL*Plus, if we write two or more queries in the workspace, e.g.
SELECT * FROM Departments; SELECT * FROM Employees
the default behaviour is that the results of these queries will be displayed on separate pages (and we need to press the "Next Page" button to see the result of the second query).
It is sometimes convenient to see the results of several queries on the same page at the same time. To get this behaviour, click on the "Preferences" button the upper right corner of the browser window, and select "Single page" (under the heading "Output Page Setup").