sqlplus substr formating and column width
Doing a little connection pool troubleshooting (OAAM, I am looking at you!) I found a great sqlplus script on stackoverflow . The script uses the substr function to format the width of each column. As in: select substr(a.spid,1,9) pid, substr(b.sid,1,5) sid, substr(b.serial#,1,5) ser#, .. The problem: The column widths are all too wide. The values specified in the substr function seem to be ignored. The solution: If your database is using a multi-byte character encoding (and why wouldn't you?) you need to use the substrb function. Like this: select substrb(a.spid,1,9) pid, substrb(b.sid,1,5) sid, substrb(b.serial#,1,5) ser#, ..