If you connect to MariaDB using the command line interface, you might sometimes find that your query results are too wide, due to the number of columns being returned, and the data they contain.

Set the --auto-vertical Option

To get MariaDB to automatically switch to vertical output mode whenever the result set is wider than the terminal width, use the --auto-vertical option when launching MariaDB.

Like this:

mariadb --auto-vertical-output

That’s all.

Now when your results are too wide for the terminal, they will be output vertically.

Example

Suppose we do a query like this:

SELECT 
    BIN(1) AS '1', 
    BIN(2) AS '2', 
    BIN(3) AS '3', 
    BIN(4) AS '4', 
    BIN(5) AS '5', 
    BIN(6) AS '6', 
    BIN(7) AS '7', 
    BIN(8) AS '8', 
    BIN(9) AS '9', 
    BIN(10) AS '10';

Here are the results using vertical output:

 1: 1
 2: 10
 3: 11
 4: 100
 5: 101
 6: 110
 7: 111
 8: 1000
 9: 1001
10: 1010

In this case, my terminal width was quite narrow, and so this caused the results to be displayed vertically.

If I widen my terminal and run the query again, they are output horizontally:

SELECT 
    BIN(1) AS '1', 
    BIN(2) AS '2', 
    BIN(3) AS '3', 
    BIN(4) AS '4', 
    BIN(5) AS '5', 
    BIN(6) AS '6', 
    BIN(7) AS '7', 
    BIN(8) AS '8', 
    BIN(9) AS '9', 
    BIN(10) AS '10';

Result:

+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
| 1    | 2    | 3    | 4    | 5    | 6    | 7    | 8    | 9    | 10   |
+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
| 1    | 10   | 11   | 100  | 101  | 110  | 111  | 1000 | 1001 | 1010 |
+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+

That’s the same result we’d get if we didn’t have the --auto-vertical option set.