I discovered the goddamn \G trick about six months ago. I couldn't believe I hadn't picked it up anywhere else. It's the most useful thing you can learn when dealing with the MySQL shell! (Especially when your eyes buzz out trying to line up a huge table!)

It seems you guys never seen the "mysql Tips" section in the MySQL manual:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-tips.html#verti...

Or this:

  mysql> help

which has gems like

  clear     (\c) Clear command.
  edit      (\e) Edit command with $EDITOR.
  ego       (\G) Send command to mysql server, display result vertically.
  quit      (\q) Quit mysql.
  source    (\.) Execute an SQL script file. Takes a file name as an argument.
  system    (\!) Execute a system shell command.
  tee       (\T) Set outfile [to_outfile]. Append everything into given outfile.

\c alone could save you a ton of headache. \e's pretty classy, too; just make sure you follow it with a semicolon to execute the command.

goddamn, this is great. Why have I never heard of this before

This is a really useful trick.

Does anyone know of an Oracle analog?

Just write a program to connect to oracle, run queries, and print the results in your desired format. It should be about 5 lines of code.

See also DBI::Shell on CPAN.