Need to execute SQL PLUS commands from C# code

Question

Hello all,
This is my first question here and hopefully I will get my solution :)
Right now we are doing 3 tasks manually
1) Clearing everything from a DB.
We use sql plus and execute this :
RAMNIVAS_CI/RAMNIVAS_CI@orclwex3
set pages 0
set lines 80
spool c:\delete_objects_CI
select 'drop '||object_type||' '||object_name||';'
from user_objects;
spool off
start c:\delete_objects_CI.lst
purge recyclebin;
set pages 100
select count(*) from user_objects;
RAMNIVAS_CI/RAMNIVAS_CI@orclwex3 are the username and pwd which gets input when we paste entire thing in sql plus
2) Then we restore that DB again using sql plus to do it using the command:
imp file=CL.DMP log=CL.log buffer=1000000 fromuser=RAMNIVAS_CL touser=RAMNIVAS_CL statistics=none grants=n commit=y
3)Execute sql scripts on it using sql developer. (This is not hard I guess coz I know we can use oracle client)
4) Take backup using this command:
exp RAMNIVAS_CI/RAMNIVAS_CI@ORCLWEX3 file=CI.dmp log=CI.log direct=y compress=y buffer=1000000 grants=n statistics=none
Is there anything I cna do to execute SQL PLUS commands using c#?

Answer 1

Hi,
You can execute OS commands via the SHELL function provided in .NET. See the MSDN for more info.
Some of the things you can do directly from .NET via ODP and PLSQL, some not.
1) Dropping the user objects can be done via a plsql procedure where you open a cursor for "select 'drop '||object_type||' '||object_name||';' ..." and then use EXECUTE IMMEDIATE to execute the resulting commands. You can invoke the procedure via ODP.
2) IMP is an exe, not a sqlplus command, so you're not actually using sqlplus there. You can still use the SHELL command though to invoke that.
3) Executing SQL Scripts via ODP.NET is not something you can do very easily. If you search the threads here you should be able to find some solutions others have come up with to parse the file and execute the statements one by one, but there's nothing built in to ODP to execute a script file.
You may want to just shell out to sqlplus user/pwd@db @scriptfile.sql but you may have issues trying to track down errors if any occurred, as I'm not sure where they go in that case.
4) just as with IMP, EXP is an exe, so you could shell out to that.
Corrections/comments welcome.
Greg