Oracle DBMS package command to export table content as INSERT statement

I know this is an old thread, but I just stumbled upon it and I feel this has not been explained completely.

There is a huge difference in SQL*Plus between the meaning of a / and a ; because they work differently.

The ; ends a SQL statement, whereas the / executes whatever is in the current "buffer". So when you use a ; and a / the statement is actually executed twice.

You can easily see that using a / after running a statement:

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Wed Apr 18 12:37:20 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2010, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the Partitioning and OLAP options

SQL> drop table foo;

Table dropped.

SQL> /
drop table foo
           *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist

In this case one actually notices the error.


But assuming there is a SQL script like this:

drop table foo;
/

And this is run from within SQL*Plus then this will be very confusing:

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Wed Apr 18 12:38:05 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2010, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the Partitioning and OLAP options

SQL> @drop

Table dropped.

drop table foo
           *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist

The / is mainly required in order to run statements that have embedded ; like CREATE PROCEDURE,CREATE FUNCTION,CREATE PACKAGE statements and for any BEGIN...END blocks.

Your syntax almost works in SQL Server 2008 (but not in SQL Server 2005¹):

CREATE TABLE MyTable (id int, name char(10));

INSERT INTO MyTable (id, name) VALUES (1, 'Bob'), (2, 'Peter'), (3, 'Joe');

SELECT * FROM MyTable;

id |  name
---+---------
1  |  Bob       
2  |  Peter     
3  |  Joe       

¹ When the question was answered, it was not made evident that the question was referring to SQL Server 2005. I am leaving this answer here, since I believe it is still relevant.