Question

Is it possible to use sqlplus to programmatically check a database connection (in particular, the SYS account)?

I’m thinking something along this line

1. Run sql plus (using Process.Start) with some parameter, giving the sys username and password
2. Check the exit code (or even the stdout), whether it is successful or not. The best way I can come up so far is to check the stdout string whether the substring “ERROR” exist, but I don’t think this is very clean

Is this something possible? What parameter do you suggest I use?
The reason I want to do this is because System.Data.OracleClient doesn’t support connection as SYSDBA

Answer 1

This might work

whenever sqlerror exit failure
whenever oserror exit failure
conn user/pwd@db-name
select 'success' from dual;
exit

The above script will have the following behaviour:

• sqlplus process will return non-zero code if there was an error
• Otherwise sqlplus will return zero

Note that I haven’t tested the above.

Amendment

The script should be run as follows on unix:

sqlplus -nolog @script-file.sql

And as follows on windows:

sqlplus /nolog @script-file.sql