Several people asked about the BOOLEAN data type in Oracle. Although it is part of the SQL standard, Oracle does not allow type BOOLEAN in regular SQL. It does allow it in PL/SQL. We recommend using type INT instead, and treating 1 as TRUE, 0 as FALSE or something like that.

We're also getting a number of questions about Oracle doing a messy printout of tuples, where tuples spread over several lines. The simplest cure is to choose relatively short character strings as your string types, because Oracle always allocates the maximum possible number of columns for each attribute. If you really want long strings in your data, you have little option. However, if you are willing to tolerate truncation of occasional long strings, create a dummmy relation with the same attributes as the relation you want to print, but with short strings as types. INSERT the result of your query into the dummy relation, and then print it. You'll see truncated strings, but you may find the result more pleasing to look at.