What is TCL and OraTCL and what's it got to do with Oracle?

TCL stands for "Tool Command Language" and is pronounced "tickle." TCL is a portable scripting language similar to Perl and PHP that can run on different platforms like Unix, Linux, Windows, MAC, etc.

OraTCL is an Oracle OCI-like extension to the TCL Language. OraTCL allows one to run SQL and PL/SQL statements from TCL programs and get the results back in strings.

OraTCL was adopted by Oracle Corporation and is used for several of the Enterprise Manager (OEM) Event and Job scripts. OraTCL is installed with the OEM Inteligent Agent, and is thus always available for use by Oracle DBAs and developers.

TCL scripts are executed with the "tclsh" command interpreter. Look at this example TCL Script:

puts stdout "Please enter your name:"
gets stdin  name
puts stdout "Hello $name"