Reserved words

Informix®

With Informix, it is possible to create database objects with reserved words.

CREATE TABLE table ( char CHAR(10) );

Indeed this is not good practice, but Informix SQL allows this to be backward compatible when introducing a new keyword in the SQL syntax.

Most other database systems do not allow reserved words as database identifiers. If your legacy code is using SQL reserved words of the target database SQL syntax, an error will be thrown at CREATE TABLE execution.

ORACLE

SQL object names like table and column names cannot be SQL reserved words in ORACLE.

An example of a common word which is part of the ORACLE SQL grammar is 'level'.

Solution

Table or column names which are ORACLE reserved words must be renamed.

ORACLE reserved keywords are listed in the ORACLE documentation, or Oracle 8i provides the V$RESERVED_WORDS view to track Oracle reserved words. All BDL application sources must be verified. To check if a given keyword is used in a source, you can use UNIX™ 'grep' or 'awk' tools. Most modifications can be done automatically with UNIX tools like 'sed' or 'awk'.