Our testing team found some problems with our latest software delivery. I needed to fix those problems quickly. The first step to correcting a problem is to replicate it. Unfortunately the testing team does all their work in their own database. Luckily I have an account in that database.I wanted to replicate a bug discovered by a senior tester. So at first I spied on the data for the transaction. My eye could not detect anything unusual. Therefore I decided to copy the data into my own development database. I figured the best way to do this was to export the data of interest as SQL insert scripts, which later could be run.
My PL/SQL Developer tool supported the export of data as SQL script. I selected the tables I wanted. After inputting the WHERE clause, PL/SQL Developer generated SQL insert scripts for me. However when I tried to execute them with Oracle SQL*Plus, I kept getting errors. Apparently there is a 256 character limit per line of script using SQL*Plus. PL/SQL Developer had created scripts with very long lines. I manually broke those lines up into short lines to placate SQL*Plus.
There has to be an easier way than that. Perhaps I could execute the SQL inserts from select statements right in SQL*Plus. Normally I don't do things that affect more than one database at a time. However I can do things through database links I guess. There should be an option within PL/SQL Developer that controls output line length, right? Let me know if you have any other ideas for this problem. It stinks to have to manually format script files.
