evelopment can take many approaches, because many CASE tools are available for Oracle and MySQL databases. Oracle SQL Developer and Oracle MySQL Workbench are the current vendor CASE development tools. Many others exist, such as Quest’s Toad for Oracle or Toad for MySQL Freeware.

Although it was tempting to demonstrate how to create and maintain tables with one or more of these CASE tools, that wouldn’t help you script production solutions or write SQL to support web applications. So I’ve opted to explain how to use the SQL*Plus and MySQL Monitor, because these skills feed your abilities to develop database-centric applications.

This chapter describes how you connect to and disconnect from the environment; write, edit, save, and abort entry of SQL statements and log files; call and run script files, functions, and procedures; and set session variables for SQL*Plus and MySQL Monitor.