Saturday, February 25, 2012

Column naming/spacing

Is it possible to have spacing within a column name? Something like
"column name." I can do it from EM but won't let me do it in query
analyzer. Can someone tell me the command to do this in query
analyzer? Thanks!There are two ways to handle special characters (or reserved keywords) in
identifiers (databases, tables, other object names, etc.):

- using brackets [], like this (the example below includes some other
objects like database and table names with special characters):

SELECT [My Column] FROM [My~Database].[My^User^ID].[My$Table]

- using double quotation marks (this is the SQL-92 syntax), like this:

SELECT "My Column" FROM "My~Database"."My^User^ID"."My$Table"

In order to use the double quotation marks the QUOTED_IDENTIFIER option has
to be ON. You can do that in Query Analyzer by running:

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON

It is not a good practice to use special characters in identifiers as it
makes code difficult to read and maintain.

HTH,

Plamen Ratchev
http://www.SQLStudio.com

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