COLUMN column NEWLINE

Question

Is there a way to keep together on the same page all columns
associated with a SELECT statement when one of the columns
contains a NEWLINE clause? Sometime a page break occurs
before the column containing the NEWLINE clause.

Answer 1

The NEWLINE column may even be spilt over two pages. There is no
direct widow/orphan (to use word processing terminology) control in
SQL*Plus.
Potential solutions depend on your definition of page size and if you
can predict the maximum row size.
1. Put just one row on a page:
break on row skip page
column col1 newline
select col1, col2 from mytable;
2. If the data is short put a predefined number of rows, e.g. 3, on
each page:
set pagesize 50000
column col1 newline
column mynp noprint
break on mynp skip page
select col1, col2, trunc((rownum+2)/3) mynp from mytable;
3. Use HTML mode. This redefines PAGESIZE to be the number of data
rows between headings/titles and let your browser handle all the
formatting
set pagesize 10
set markup html on
select ..