The following sections describes separators.
Lexical Separators
A lexical separator is a character string that can be placed between words, literals, and delimiters without changing the meaning of a statement.
- Comments
- Pad characters (several pad characters are treated as a single pad character except in a string literal)
- RETURN characters (X’0D’)
Statement Separators
The SEMICOLON is a Teradata SQL statement separator.
Each statement of a multistatement request must be separated from any subsequent statement with a semicolon.
The following multistatement request illustrates the semicolon as a statement separator.
SHOW TABLE Payroll_Test ; INSERT INTO Payroll_Test
(EmpNo, Name, DeptNo) VALUES ('10044', 'Jones M',
'300') ; INSERT INTO ...
For statements entered using BTEQ, a request terminates with an input line-ending semicolon unless that line has a comment, beginning with two dashes (- -). Everything to the right of the - - is a comment. In this case, the semicolon must be on the following line.
The SEMICOLON as a statement separator in a multistatement request is a Teradata extension to the ANSI/ISO SQL:2011 standard.
Related Topics
For an explanation of comment lexical separators, see Comments.