Identifier¶
Guidelines for Creating Identifiers¶
Table name, index name, view name, column name, user name etc. are included in identifier. The guidelines for creating identifiers are as follows:
- An identifier must begin with a letter; it must not begin with a number or a symbol.
- It is not case-sensitive.
- Reserved Words are not allowed.
identifier ::= identifier_letter [ { other_identifier }; ] identifier_letter ::= upper_case_letter | lower_case_letter other_identifier ::= identifier_letter | digit | _ | # digit ::= 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 upper_case_letter ::= A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P| Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z lower_case_letter ::= a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p| q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z
Legal Identifiers¶
Beginning with a Letter
An identifier must begin with a letter. All other special characters except operator characters are allowed. The following are examples of legal identifiers.
a
a_b
ssn#
this_is_an_example_#
Enclosing in Double Quotes, Square Brackets, or Backtick Symbol
Identifiers or reserved keywords shown as below are not allowed. However, if they are enclosed in double quotes, square brackets, or backtick symbol, they are allowed as an exception. Especially, the double quotations can be used as a symbol enclosing identifiers when the ansi_quotes parameter is set to yes. If this value is set to no double quotations are used as a symbol enclosing character strings. The following are examples of legal identifiers.
" select"
" @lowcost"
" low cost"
" abc" " def"
[position]
Note
From 10.0 version, if a column name which is a reserved word is used together with a "table name (or alias).", you don't need to wrap up a column name with a double quotes.
CREATE TABLE tbl ("int" int, "double" double);
SELECT t.int FROM tbl t;
In the above SELECT query, "int" is a column name which is used together with "t.".
Illegal Identifiers¶
Beginning with special characters or numbers
An identifier starting with a special character or a number is not allowed. As an exception, a underline (_) and a sharp symbol (#) are allowed for the first character.
_a
#ack
%nums
2fer
88abs
An identifier containing a space
An identifier that a space within characters is not allowed.
col1 t1
An identifier containing operator special characters
An identifier which contains operator special characters (+, -, *, /, %, ||, !, < , > , =, |, ^, & , ~ ) is not allowed.
col+
col~
col& &
The maximum length of an identifier name¶
The following table summarizes the maximum byte length allowable for each identifier name. Note that the unit is byte and the number of characters and the bytes are different by the character set used (for example, the length of one Korean character in UTF-8 is 3 bytes).
Identifier | Maximum Bytes |
---|---|
Database | 17 |
Table | 254 |
Column | 254 |
Index | 254 |
Constraint | 254 |
Java Stored Procedure | 254 |
Trigger | 254 |
View | 254 |
Serial | 254 |
Note
Automatically created constraint name like a name of primary key(pk_<table_name>_<column_name>) or foreign key(fk_<table_name>_<column_name>) also does not allow over the maximum name length of the identifier, 254 bytes.