Characters

The basic symbols of keywords and operators in the SQL language are single-byte characters that are part of all character sets supported by the IBM® relational database products.

Characters of the language are classified as letters, digits, or special characters.¹

A letter is any of the 26 uppercase (A through Z) and 26 lowercase (a through z) letters of the English alphabet. ²

A digit is any of the characters 0 through 9.

A special character is any of the characters listed below:

	space or blank	-	minus sign
"	quotation mark or double-quote or double quotation mark	.	period
%	percent	/	slash
&	ampersand	:	colon
'	apostrophe or single quote or single quotation mark	;	semicolon
(	left parenthesis	<	less than
)	right parenthesis	=	equals
*	asterisk	>	greater than
+	plus sign	?	question mark
,	comma	_	underline or underscore
\|	vertical bar^⁴	‸	caret
!	exclamation mark^³	[	left bracket
{	left brace	]	right bracket
}	right brace	¬	not ^³

¹ Note that if the SQL statement is encoded as Unicode data, all characters of the statement except for string constants will be converted to single-byte characters prior to processing. Tokens representing string constants may be processed as UTF-16 graphic strings without conversion to single-byte.

² Letters also include three code points reserved as alphabetic extenders for national languages (#, @, and $ in the United States). These three code points should be avoided because they represent different characters depending on the CCSID.

³ Using the not symbol (¬) and the exclamation point symbol (!) might inhibit code portability between IBM relational database products. Avoid using them because they are variant characters. Instead of ¬= or != use <>. Instead of ¬> or !> use <=. Instead of ¬< or !< use >=.

⁴ Using the vertical bar (|) character might inhibit code portability between IBM relational database products. Use the CONCAT operator instead of the concatenation operator (||).