The ALTER TABLE instruction

Informix® and MS SQL SERVER use different implementations of the ALTER TABLE instruction. For example, Informix allows you to use multiple ADD clauses separated by comma. This is not supported by SQL SERVER:

Informix:

ALTER TABLE customer ADD(col1 INTEGER), ADD(col2 CHAR(20)) 

SQL SERVER:

ALTER TABLE customer ADD col1 INTEGER, col2 CHAR(20) 

Solution

No automatic conversion is done by the database interface. There is even no real standard for this instruction (that is, no common syntax for all database servers). Read the SQL documentation and review the SQL scripts or the BDL programs in order to use the database server-specific syntax for ALTER TABLE.