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

Answer 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.

Answer 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;