If you ever used Oracle's sqlplus you'd agree that it provides an
arcane command-line interface.
Being a textmode command-line tool is not what makes it arcane though. It's that it doesn't offer auto-completion or a command history. If you made a small mistake when typing a long statement, you would have to re-enter it all over again.
Most modern command-line tools (including MySQL and PostgreSQL's equivalent to Oracle's sqlplus) provide much more powerful interfaces, just like the bash shell does. They include auto-completion of the text you are typing (by pressing TAB), access to a history of commands (up/down arrows, or C-p/C-n), incremental search on the history (C-r), they remember the history in between invocations and more. Virtually all these tools use the GNU readline library to provide these capabilities.
Unfortunately, not all command-line tools use GNU readline (splplus being one). Fortunately, there's rlwrap. I just came to know this nice little tool.
rlwrap "wraps" any other command-line tool and gives you a readline
interface to it. So, you can invoke rlwrap sqlplus and you get
sqlplus with the history capabilities of the readline library.
You may also pass to rlwrap a list of potential words to use for
completion. For example, I also use rlwrap with groovysh (the Groovy
language shell), so I created a file "~/.groovysh_completions" containing the list of commands groovysh accepts. Now, when I launch groovysh I get command history and specialized auto-completion.
Now, rlwrap cannot do magic. Being so generic, it cannot do
intelligent context-dependent auto-completion. For instance, PostgreSQL's command-line interface automatically pulls the list of
potential table names after doing SELECT * FROM <TAB>. rlwrap cannot give this intelligence to sqlplus, but it's still much better than nothing.