I came across HenPlusa nice looking console based SQL-shell for database interaction, rather like SQL*Plus for Oracle, but this claims to work for any JDBC data source.
It wasn't straightforward to install HenPlus on Mac OSX, largely due to HenPlus needing java-readline which in turn requires the darwin ports version of readline.
Thankfully, the blogosphere has got there first, and a step-by-step guide to getting java-readline working has been provided by Brian. cheers.