Jeremy Boynes wrote:
Reserving additional words from the second group poses a bigger issue as users' may have databases out there already using these words as identifiers. The smoothest path is probably to give people an indication of which words will need to be reserved at some point and hence should be avoided; it is better for us to do this earlier than later.
Actually having even keywords defined as reserved by the SQL Standard reserved in Derby has caused problems. I recently changed LOCAL not to be a reserved word as other databases do not enforce it. We probably need some set rules, but reserving because the SQL standard says so it not the approach taken by other products.
'The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from' :-)
Especially true with 4 versions of ISO SQL and N vendor-specific dialects. One of the issues users face is that the spec evolves and products implement newer versions, words that were not reserved before now need to be.
Ideally we would not need to reserve anything, giving users complete freedom on how they name their things; however, that would make the parser, lets say, challenging. Short of this ideal, I think we should compormise and only reserve words needed to resolve ambiguity in the parser; that lets users decide how much portability they need. To help them do that I think it's useful for us to indicate direction and what is likely to be reserved (SAVEPOINT) vs. what isn't (PERCENTILE_DISC).
Is it worth raising a warning on DDL operations that define objects that conflict with SQL's reservation list?
-- Jeremy
