Laura Stewart wrote:
Hi -
Should there be a semi-colon at the end of the SQL statement examples
in the Derby documentation. In other documentation work that I have
done, this was the standard. I just wanted to check with the Derby
community to see what is appropriate for the Derby docs.
I don't know if there's a "rule" for this in Derby docs, but it seems to me that
at some point someone somewhere pointed out that, technically, the semi-colon is
NOT part of the SQL statement. For example, I think if you include the
semi-colon at the end of a SQL statement in a JDBC call like:
ResultSet rs = st.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM T1;");
the result will be a syntax error caused by the presence of the semi-colon:
ERROR 42X01: Syntax error: Encountered ";" at line 1 ...
I think the semi-colon is a popular statement terminator for a lot of
command-line interfaces to databases, including Derby's own ij. But in the case
of ij the semi-colon is stripped off before the statement is actually passed to
the Derby engine, so it (the semi-colon) is really an ij requirement, not a SQL
statement requirement.
My personal answer to your question, then, would be that the semi-colon should
only be included if the doc is showing the example statement as it would be
executed in ij. So if the doc looked like:
ij> connect 'mydb';
ij> select * from t1;
I'd say include the semi-colon. But if the example is just an example of how to
select all the rows from t1 or an example of how to use the syntax for a Derby
SQL statement, I'd say leave the semicolon off:
select * from t1
FWIW,
Army
