The outstanding Emacs Org-mode enables you to include source code blocks our text. Org-Babel then enables you to execute that code.
Yesterday I came across the Orgmode cookbook. In a section it shows how to write a SQL statement and execute it agains a postgresql database. Very nice I thought, but what about Oracle DB? Because that what I use at work.

No official support

Oracle DB is not supported as of now. There is a proposed patch. It adds the call to sqlplus, Oracle DBs command line client. But on the mailing list there was no discussion about it. 🙁 One trick it applies is to add the „.sql“ suffix to the input file to sqlplus.

So now I got the following code that is an additional branch in the org-babel-execute:sql function:

Formating the result

Now I got the SQL executing against my db. The output was a bit weired. I experimented with sqlplus formatting with mixed results.

I consulted the elisp source. The result is converted into an orgmode table using TAB as a delimiter. In an example that had two rather long columns with short column names, sqlplus used several tabs between the two column names and so screwed the output quite a bit.

I don’t have a good solution for that. My workaround is to use comma as a column seperator (set colsep ',') and let orgmode guess that. For that I had to touch one line:

Also I deleted the first empty line using an oracle-branch in org-babel-result-cond/with-temp-buffer:

Conclusion

In principle, it works. How nice formatted the output it is, depends on your query. When just documenting a query, as an alternative to orgmode I use SQL-Mode and format the result myself.