Learning is not a spectator sport

One of the very cool facilities in more recent versions of SQLcl is the skills command. The reason I like the command is that most of us have tinkered with various different harnesses such as Claude, Codex or any of the other AI related tools, in order to come up with some model/tool preferences for particular tasks. The problem with that is when you want to utilize our provided Oracle skills, then you become responsible for making sure all of those files are in the right place for each of the various tools you’re using.

The skills command in SQLCL solves this by fetching our official Oracle skills repository and placing them into all the appropriate correct places so that all the various tools you’re using will be able to take advantage of our Oracle skill definitions.

All you have to do is run “skills sync” and you can see that our various skills are copied into the various click correct locations.

SQL> skills sync -force
SUCCESS: Synchronized DBTools skills repository to C:\Users\connor\.dbtools\skills\repositories\oracle-skills version latest (refs/heads/main -> b94ccf4dec34b27859c2378fa71ba2bad884f2fe).
SUCCESS: Installed 15 entries into agent skill locations.
SUCCESS: DBTools skills sync log: C:\Users\connor\.dbtools\skills\logs\skills-sync-20260922T115145.795Z.log
SQL>

This post is just to add a little word of warning for you when it comes to repeating that command. We will frequently be updating our skills to make them better quality for you and keeping them up to date as well as adding new skills for various facilities such as APEXLang. Our Oracle skill repo is public and we encourage you, the community, to also add your knowledge to the skills via PRs so that we can consolidate and build a global collective knowledge base of best practices for Oracle Database and Oracle Development Tools.

So when it comes to refreshing your skills to get the latest version you probably think I’ll just rerun a skill sync command but you might see output that looks something like this:

SQL> skills sync
SUCCESS: Synchronized DBTools skills repository to C:\Users\connor\.dbtools\skills\repositories\oracle-skills version latest (refs/heads/main -> b94ccf4dec34b27859c2378fa71ba2bad884f2fe).
SUCCESS: Installed 0 entries into agent skill locations.
WARN: Skipped existing skill entries: C:\Users\connor\.claude\skills\apex, C:\Users\connor\.claude\skills\db, C:\Users\connor\.claude\skills\fusion, C:\Users\connor\.claude\skills\graal, C:\Users\connor\.claude\skills\oci, C:\Users\connor\.codex\skills\apex, C:\Users\connor\.codex\skills\db, C:\Users\connor\.codex\skills\fusion, C:\Users\connor\.codex\skills\graal, C:\Users\connor\.codex\skills\oci, C:\Users\connor\.copilot\skills\apex, C:\Users\connor\.copilot\skills\db, C:\Users\connor\.copilot\skills\fusion, C:\Users\connor\.copilot\skills\graal, C:\Users\connor\.copilot\skills\oci
SUCCESS: DBTools skills sync log: C:\Users\connor\.dbtools\skills\logs\skills-sync-20260922T115122.952Z.log

Notice that we skipped any existing skills. So your sync command may not actually have retrieved the latest set of skills. For this reason, you probably want to be using the “-force” option when syncing your skills if you’ve already got some skills in place.

SQL> skills sync -force
SUCCESS: Synchronized DBTools skills repository to C:\Users\connor\.dbtools\skills\repositories\oracle-skills version latest (refs/heads/main -> b94ccf4dec34b27859c2378fa71ba2bad884f2fe).
SUCCESS: Installed 15 entries into agent skill locations.
SUCCESS: DBTools skills sync log: C:\Users\connor\.dbtools\skills\logs\skills-sync-20260922T115145.795Z.log
SQL>

Happy skill-ing 😊and don’t forget to check our skills GitHub repo such that you can add your knowledge and help all of the Oracle community prosper.