Command Line or GUI – Which is Best?

At present I am suffering ever so slightly from “split personality disorder”* in respect of my liking for Command Line and GUI interfaces.

On the one hand, much to my colleagues mild reproach, I use SQL*PLus and not PL/SQL Developer for my day-to-day work. Even worse, I got sick of using notepad to hack around scripts {I am working in a windows client environment and you simply can’t use MS Word with SQL files!} so I have retrograded recently and downloaded a windows-complient ‘vi’ interface and it is soooooo nice to be able to use powerful ‘vi’ commands on my files once more. “:.,$s/^ /,/”. Ahhh, it is so much easier. I can do stuff in 3 seconds in ‘vi’ that would take me 10 minutes in Notepad in a large, complex file. That and, I’m sorry, but notepad seems to be unable to manage a 100MB file, despite me having 2GB of real memory and a decent machine, but ‘vi’ has no problem with it at all.
Even more retrograde, I have direct telnet access to my linux servers and I am getting back to that as it makes me so much more productive. “ls -alrt ^d” for all directories anyone? “df -k .” to see how many data files I can add? Yep, it’s all arcane and means so little to many modern IT “Java/Struts/CDE” people but boy it is direct and fast. I might even dig out that book on SED and AWK.

On the other hand, I have finally (after much very painful discussions back and forth) got agreement that my site probably has access to AWR, ASH and all that good performance repository stuff. So I am hacking around with the OEM screens that focus on performance and snapshots and stuff. Now, I am traditionally not a big fan of GUI DBA tools. Partly it is because I am a bit old and stuck in my ways and partly it is because GUIs are really just “menus of options”. You are limited to what options are available in your DBA GUI tool and you have a harder time learning all the options available or what is really going on “under the covers”.

But with AWR and all those graphs, links and utilities, you can drill down into real problems real time or in the past so effectively that, well, once they start using this tool properly they will not need me at all. It is a fantastic boon to performance management and problem resolution, as well as proactive performance management.

So there you are, I am with Doug Burns on this one, in that I have Learned to Love Pictures. When the Pictures are well thought out and well connected and simple enough to help make sense of a complex system {and Oh Boy Oracle performance has become sooo Complex!!!!}

So right now, I spend half my day in vi/linux/command line world and half of it in pretty picture/GUI world. I think what really makes me happy is to leave behind the half-way-house of text-like Windows World {Windows SQL*Plus, Notepad}.

Just to finish, you can’t mention AWR without someone raising the ugly issue of licence cost and how Evil Oracle Corp were to charge for it. Well, I think it has been established that the guys and gals who developed AWR/ASH did not expect it to become a cost option but it did. And I suspect that what kept it a cost option was the community’s OutRage at it being a cost option. Anything that popular, hey, a commercial company is going to charge for. I still reckon Oracle Corp ballsed up as making it free and helping people use it a bit would have made 90% of customers’ lives easier and would have translated into user happiness and a certain % of sales for training courses to learn more, but heck my day job is to make things work, not maintain sales percentages, so my opinion counts for nowt. *sigh*

(*apologies to real sufferers of Dissociative Identity Disorder, I am using the term in the loose, non-scientific, “common usage” term of “not sure of my opinion” rather than having truly disparate personalities and memories.** And note, I certainly do not mean schizophrenia which, despite the on-going public-opinion misunderstanding, is rarely anything to do with multiple personality disorders or “spit minds” AT ALL, and is more to do with a difficulty in determining between reality and hallucination. ).