Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all

In my script i am getting two variables year and month from oracle by making two connections. In the first connection i am getting varaibel year and again i am making another connection and getting month variable from oracle.
Is there any way i can get two field values from oracle and assign it to two variables in unix with a single connection.

something like:

Code:

k=`sqlplus "select a,b from c"`
a=`echo ${k} | awk '{print $1;}'`
b=`echo ${k} | awk '{print $2;}'`