VoraX 2.5 Released

Hi guys! A new version of VoraX is available for download. As usual, I'm gonna post here what's new in this version.

First of all, VoraX is now able to display the output of a query using a vertical column layout. For those of you who don't like to horizontally scroll through very long lines (e.g. V$SESSION) this is, indeed, a nice feature. But, beyond this, there is also a practical need for such a functionality. It's kind of funny that the implementation of this vertical column layout feature was started because of an issue reported by Spratek, issue which has nothing to do with this "fancy" layout.

As you already know, Sqlplus is very peaky when comes to display BLOB content. The main issue is this stupid "SP2-0678: Column or attribute type can not be displayed by SQL*Plus" error. Damn it! It's a very annoying limitation and apparently this can't be solved that easy. Excluding BLOB columns using "column ... noprint" does not work therefore the only solution is to manually exclude those BLOB columns from your query which it means, of course, that you have to manually specify all the others. Bleah! The last solution was to use the DBMS_SQL package which helped to dynamically process the output of the query and get rid of the BLOB content, if any is present. So, if you have tables with BLOBs keep in mind that this might be your only solution to query them. The shortcut is <Leader>v1 (it's "one" not L) and you should use it only for single queries. Executing multiple queries within the same block is not supported.

Another improvement in this version is that you can now browse materialized views inside VoraX DbExplorer. This was requested by Ingo Olbrigh and might prove to be quite handy if you are working with these kind of objects.

There are also a few other minor improvements. One of them is that you can now control where to leave the focus after something is executed. Until now, the default behavior was to leave the focus into the results window. Starting with this version you may tell VoraX to return to the window from where the statement was executed (thanks Koelner.r for this suggestion). And that's not all. In addition you may now use matchit within your plsql buffers.

VoraX 2.5 comes also with a few bug fixes, already detailed in the changelog.

Have fun!

Update: Starting with 11.1, Sqlplus is smart enough to display BLOB columns without raising SP2-0678 errors. According to the Oracle documentation (New Features in SQL*Plus 11.1):
SQL*Plus supports standard querying of tables and objects containing BLOB and BFILE datatypes.