Ordinary and delimited identifiers (name)

There are two types of SQL identifiers: ordinary identifiers and delimited identifiers.

An ordinary identifier:

• Must start with a letter
• Can include uppercase letters, numbers, and underscores
• Cannot be a reserved word

If you type a lowercase letter as part of an ordinary identifier in a field, the lowercase letter is stored as an uppercase letter.

Attention: Validation of identifiers occurs when you submit an action for processing (for example, when you click OK in the Create Table notebook). At that time, you will receive an error message if the identifier you specified is invalid.

A delimited identifier:

• Must be enclosed within double quotation marks
• Can include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, underscores, and spaces
• Can contain a double quotation mark, represented by two consecutive double quotation marks

Leading spaces are stored as part of a delimited identifier, but trailing spaces are ignored.

Attention: Validation of identifiers occurs when you submit an action for processing (for example, when you click on OK on the Create Table notebook). At that time, you will receive an error message if the identifier you specified is invalid.

Examples

To name a table WKLYSAL, you can type: WKLYSAL or wklysal or Wklysal in the appropriate field. The lowercase letters are changed to uppercase, and the table name is stored as WKLYSAL. If you want the name of the table to be Wkly Sal, type: "Wkly Sal" in the appropriate field. The quotation marks are recognized as the delimiters of the identifier, and the table name is stored as Wkly Sal.

If you want the name of a column to be "Nickname", type: """Nickname""" in the appropriate field. The outermost quotation marks are recognized as the delimiters of the identifier, and each pair of consecutive quotation marks represents one quotation mark. The column name is stored as "Nickname".