Insert a blank line between records

Question

Hi,
I am creating a sqlplus report and want to insert a blank line or some seperator to seperate the records between the start and end points of the loop to make it more readable.
ex : The output currently look like this.
ColumnA       ColumnB
1                  2
2                  3
3                  1
4                  5
5                  6
6                  4I want the output to look like this
ColumnA       ColumnB
1                  2
2                  3
3                  1
4                  5
5                  6
6                  4Thanks for the help in advance!

Answer 1

Hi,
You probably work with this table every day, and you probably struggled with this particular query for a while before posting a question, so you're very familiar with the table, the data, and the application.
Perhaps no one else in the world is in that position. Don't assume we know what your data is, or where it came from.
Are you getting the data from a query like this?
SELECT     columna
,     columnb
FROM     table_x
START WITH          columna     IN (1, 4)
CONNECT BY NOCYCLE     columna     = PRIOR (columnb)
;If so, that's the kind of thing you should say clearly in your first message, rather than hint at in your third.
As Ow said, you should manufacture a column for use in the BREAK command, and use COLUMN ... NOPRINT if you don't want to see it in the results?
The question here is, what is an appropriate column? CONNECT_BY_ROOT seems to work perfectly for your example
BREAK     ON my_break_column     SKIP 1
COLUMN     my_break_column     NOPRINT
SELECT     columna
,     columnb
,     CONNECT_BY_ROOT     columna     AS my_break_column
FROM     table_x
START WITH          columna     IN (1, 4)
CONNECT BY NOCYCLE     columna     = PRIOR (columnb)
;The rest of this message is an merely a tangent. I find it interesting, but feel free to skip it.
You might think CONNECT_BY_ISCYCLE was an obvious choice for a BREAK oclumn: you want to skip a line after every output row where CONNECT_BY_ISCYCLE = 1.
Unfortunately, BREAK always works when a column value changes. That is, you can't tell it "Please skip one line after rows where columnz = 1"; all you can say is "Please skip a row before rows where columnz is different than it was on the previous row". (At least that's what I think: I would love it if someone proved me wrong!)
So we have to manufacture some column that keeps its value for an entire loop. The SUM of CONNECT_BY_ISCYCLE (in DESCending order, as returned by the CONNECT BY query) would work. Analytic ORDER BY clauses seem to destroy the order imposed by CONNECT BY, so you'd have to do the CONNECT BY in a sub-query, capture the ROWNUM to preserve the order, and use the analytic SUM function in the main query:
WITH     oq     AS
     SELECT     columna
     ,     columnb
     ,     ROWNUM               AS r_num
     ,     CONNECT_BY_ISCYCLE     AS cycle_val
     FROM     table_x
     START WITH          columna     IN (1, 4)
     CONNECT BY NOCYCLE     columna     = PRIOR (columnb)
SELECT     columna
,     columnb
,     root
,     SUM (cycle_val) OVER (ORDER BY ROWNUM DESC)
--               AS my_break_column
FROM     oq
ORDER BY     r_num
;The only reason for actually doing this is to learn about CONNECT BY queries. CONNECT_BY_ROOT, as shown above, works much better for your requirements.