SQLcl

Oracle SQL Dev – VS Code – Recovering Deleted Connections

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With the current early release, there is no way to organise your Database connections like you can in the full Oracle SQL Developer. We are told this will/might be possible in a future release but it might be later this year (or longer) before that feature will be available.

In a previous post, I showed how to import your connections from the full SQL Developer into SQL Dev VS Code. While this is a bit of a fudge, yet relatively straight forward to do, you may or may not want all those connections in your SQL Dev VS Code environment. Typically, you will use different tools, such as SQLcl, SQL*Plus, SQL Developer, etc to perform different tasks, and will only want those connections set up in one of those tools.

As shown in my previous post, SQL Dev VS Code and SQLcl share the same set of connections. These connections and their associated files are stored in the same folder on your computer. On my computer/laptop (which is currently a Mac) this connections folder can be found in the $HOME/.dbtools.

I kind of forgot this important little detail and started to clean up my connections in SQL Dev VS Code, but removing some of my old and less frequently used Connections. Only to discover, that these were no longer listed or available to use in SQLcl, using the connmgr command.

The question I had was, How can I recover these connections?

One option was to reimport the connections into SQLcl following the steps given in a previous blog post. When I do that, the connections are refreshed/overwritten in SQLcl, and because of the shared folder will automatically reappear in SQL Dev VS Code the next time I open it or by clicking on the refresh icon in the Connections pane in SQL Dev VS Code.

But was there a simpler solution? Yes there is, so let’s walk through a simple scenario to illustrate what you need to do.

In SQL Dev VS Code, you can delete a connection by right clicking the connection and selecting Delete from the popup menu. You’ll be asked to confirm the deletion of the connection.

Open a Terminal window and go to your $HOME/.dbtools/connections directory.

In this folder, you will see the deleted connections lists with ‘.removed’. These are your deleted connections. Some might have their original connection name with ‘.removed’ and others will have some weird name, for example, ‘zZqtNdeinniqNhofxqNI9Q.removed‘.

To make the deleted connection usable again just rename the directory removing the ‘.removed’ part. For example,

mv B01-Student2-Brendan.removed B01-Student2-Brendan

If you go back to SQL Dev VS Code, the connection will reappear in the list of Connections after about 5 seconds (on my laptop) but if it doesn’t then click on the refresh icon.

This entry was posted in Oracle SQL Developer, SQL_CL, VS Code and tagged , , .

Oracle SQL Dev – VS Code – Import connections via SQLcl

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I mentioned in my previous post about importing your SQL Developer connections into the VS Code Extension. The following are the steps you need to complete. A more direct method to import directly from SQL Developer will be available in an upcoming extension update.

To complete this migration of your database connects, you’ll need to have SQLcl (SQL Command Line) version 23.3 installed, as it comes with a new Connection Manager feature.

The first step involves exporting your SQL Developer connections. To do this right-click on ‘Oracle Connections’ in SQL Developer, and then select ‘Export Connections’ from the pop-up menu. Select all your connections and then go through the remaining steps of giving a file name, giving a password, and then Finish.

When the file has been created and the connection exported, go open SQLcl (needs to be a minimum of version 23.3), in /nolog mode.

Set the password used for the SQL Developers connections file. In this example ‘MyPassword’ is the password I entered when creating the file.

SQL> secret set mySecret MyPassword
Secret mySecret stored

Now we can import the connections file.

SQL> connmgr import -key mySecret /Users/brendan.tierney/SQLDev-connections.json
Importing connection 23c-VM-STUDENT: Success
Importing connection B01-Student-Admin: Success
Importing connection B01-Student-Brendan: Success
Importing connection Oracle 23c - Docker - SYS: Success
Importing connection Oracle 23c - Docker - HR: Success
Importing connection 23-Free-VM-SYS: Success
Importing connection B01-Student2-Admin: Success
Importing connection 23-Free-VM-STUDENT: Success
Importing connection 23c-VM-SYSTEM: Success
Importing connection Oracle 23c - Docker - System: Success
Importing connection Oracle 23c - Docker - Benchmark: Success
Importing connection 23-Free-VM-SYSTEM: Success
Importing connection 23c-VM-SYS: Success
Importing connection Oracle 23c - Docker - SH: Success
Importing connection 23c-VM-STUDENT2: Success
Importing connection Oracle 23c - Docker - Brendan: Success
Importing connection B01-Student2-Brendan: Success
17 connection(s) processed

If you need to reimport the connections file, you’ll need to use the replace option. Here’s an example.

connmgr import -duplicates replace -key mySecret /Users/brendan.tierney/SQLDev-connections.json

You can see above the connections were imported. You can list these by running

SQL> connmgr list
23-Free-VM-STUDENT
23-Free-VM-SYS
23-Free-VM-SYSTEM
...

To connect to one of these connections using its label by running the following, where the label for the connection is in quotes

SQL> connect -name "Oracle 23c - Docker - Brendan"
Connected.

SQL> show connection
COMMAND_PROPERTIES:
 type: STORE
 name: Oracle 23c - Docker - Brendan
 user: brendan
CONNECTION:
 BRENDAN@jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/FREEPDB1 
CONNECTION_IDENTIFIER:
 jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/FREEPDB1
CONNECTION_DB_VERSION:
 Oracle Database 23c Free, Release 23.0.0.0.0 - Developer-Release
 Version 23.2.0.0.0
NOLOG:
 false
PRELIMAUTH:
 false

We’ve just imported and verified the import of our SQL Developer connections into SQLcl. The next step is to import them into VS Code. To do this is very easy. If you don’t have VS Code open, open it and the connections will be automatically imported from SQLcl. How easy is that! or if you have VS Code already open just click on the refresh button in the Connections section.

Note: The connections listed in VS code are shared with SQLcl. If you delete any of these connections in VS Code they will be deleted/removed from SQLcl. It’s the one set of connection details being shared by both applications. So some care is needed. I’m sure future releases of the VS Code extension will provide better options for managing your connections.

This entry was posted in SQL Developer, SQL_CL, VS Code and tagged , , .