Just re-read the Jane Street article OCaml as a scripting language†, and added an interactive toplevel to OCI*ML and a first stab at a make install task, but I still have to do:

$ ocimlsh -I <directory where ociml.cma and .cmi are>

So there must be something wrong in my Makefile 😦 Anyone got any suggestions?

Anyway, consider (qq for “quick query”):

open Ociml
open Report

let qq sth sqltext =
  orasql sth sqltext;
  let r = new report (Array.map orastring (oracols sth)) in
  begin
    try
      while true do
	  let row = Array.map orastring (orafetch sth) in
	  r#add_row row;
      done;
    with |Not_found -> ();
  end;
  r#print_report ();

Save as qq.ml then:

$ ../ociml/ocimlsh -I ../ociml/
        Objective Caml version 3.12.0

# #use "qq.ml";;
# let lda = oralogon "gaius/abc123";;
# let sth = oraopen lda;;
# qq sth "select * from ociml_test";;
CONSTANT_ID DATE_ENTERED         CONSTANT_NAME           CONST_VALUE      
----------- -------------------- ----------------------- ---------------- 
1           13-MAY-2011 20:47:09 PI                      3.142000         
2           01-JAN-1970 01:00:00 e                       2.718000         
3           13-MAY-2011 20:47:10 Square root 2           1.410000         
4           13-MAY-2011 20:47:10 Speed of light          300000000.000000 
5           13-MAY-2011 20:47:10 Acceleration of gravity 9.800000         
- : unit = ()
#

I need to make ocimlsh as straightforward to use as SQL*Plus so that even people who presently mash up sqlplus and bash to write “throwaway” scripts will want to adopt it. I think it’s already simpler than Perl and DBI. And Report formats better than SQL*Plus which always gets the column widths wrong…

† Also see Scripting with Types from Galois.