Oracle SQLcl version 25.4 is now available for download.

But practically, what does that mean for me?

I’m chatting with Oracle AI Lakehouse (or data warehouse), and my questions are taking a long time.

Some queries take a while to run. Popular data warehouse benchmarking reports can even take HOURS. But the default timeout for our MCP Server tool requests is only 60 seconds.

So what should business users do?

Now our run-sql tool allows you to have LLM generated queries run asynchronously, or ‘in the background’. This allows agents to query something in the database, and then come back later to get the answer. The agent is then free to handle other parts of your plan, assuming they don’t depend on the given query.

This also means it can task our MCP Server with multiple queries vs waiting/executing, one at a time.

Immediate MCP server response –

Task has been set to run in background successfully with id: 0

And this is all the information the Agent needs to request the results later. Note that there is no ‘new tool’ that the Agent can interact with, it simply calls the run-sql tool again, this time asking for the status or results of job #0.

If this sounds familiar, then great! We added this feature generally to SQLcl in 2024 (24.1), and now the accompanying MCP Server follows the same workflow.

One more MCP thing… a series of ‘private’ connections

I’ll talk about this in more detail in a follow-up post, but you can tell SQLcl when running as an MCP Server to use a specific directory for your settings and configuration. This effectively means you have a limited set of Oracle database connections available for the AI ​​Agent to use versus all the connections you have defined for SQLcl and the SQL Developer Extension for VS Code.

Is there anything interesting here for us humans?

Very! Help is easier to navigate.

Press space to go forward, B to ‘back’, and use ‘/’ to enter a search term to jump to a topic/section.

Tab completion pretty much covers everything Now.

Commands, sub-commands, help, file names, table names, sql keywords, YES YES YES.

History of SQL more accessible, more look for!

From the prompt, press ‘Alt+R’ to activate search, enter your term, the first entry will appear into the buffer. use ‘Ctrl+R’ to run it.

Additionally, a new setting, AUTOSUGGESTIONS will ‘shadow’ the first matching query from your SQL History as you type…