HP 3000 Manuals

ALLBASE/SQL Pascal Application Programming Guide

General Rules for Embedding SQL 

Embedded SQL commands must appear in certain locations within the Pascal
program.  Each embedded SQL command must be accompanied by a prefix and
followed by a semicolon.  Comments may be placed within an embedded
command, and non-numeric literals in embedded commands may be continued
from one line to another.

An embedded SQL command has no maximum length.  A dynamic SQL command can
be no longer than 2048 bytes as a literal string, but the maximum size of
the host variable is 32,762.

Location of SQL Commands 

SQL commands must be put into the following specific areas:

   *   BEGIN DECLARE SECTION and END DECLARE SECTION may appear in any
       declaration section in a main program.  In a subprogram, these
       commands cannot appear in the global declaration section.

   *   INCLUDE SQLCA should be in the global declaration section of the
       main program.  INCLUDE SQLDA should be in the global declaration
       of any main or in a declaration section of a procedure.

   *   All other SQL commands may appear in any statement part.

Prefix and Suffix 

Precede each SQL command with the prefix EXEC SQL and terminate each SQL
command with a semicolon (;).  The entire prefix, EXEC SQL, must be
specified on one line.  For example, the following examples are legal:

     EXEC SQL SELECT PartName INTO :PartName
               FROM Purchdb.Parts WHERE PartNumber = :PartNumber;

     EXEC SQL SELECT PartName
                INTO :PartName
                FROM Purchdb.Parts
                WHERE PartNumber = :PartNumber;

However, the following is not legal:

     EXEC
          SQL SELECT PartName INTO :PartName
                FROM Purchdb.Parts WHERE PartNumber = :PartNumber;

Punctuation 

SQL commands are always terminated with a semicolon (;).

Pascal Comments 

You may insert Pascal comment lines within or between embedded SQL
commands.  A comment begins with { and closes with } or begins with (*
and closes with *), as follows:

     EXEC SQL SELECT PartNumber, PartName
          {  put the data into the following host variables  }
     INTO :PartNumber, :PartName
          (* find the data in the following table *)
     FROM Purchdb.Parts
          {  retrieve only data that satisfies this search condition *)
     WHERE PartNumber = :PartNumber;
          (* end of command }

ALLBASE/SQL Comments 

SQL comments can be inserted in any line of an SQL statement, except the
last line, by prefixing the comment character with at least one space
followed by two hyphens followed by one space:

     EXEC SQL SELECT * FROM PurchDB.Parts    -- This code selects Parts Table values
              WHERE SalesPrice > 500.0;

The comment terminates at the end of the current line.  (The decimal
point in the 500 improves performance when being compared to SalesPrice,
which also has a decimal; no data type conversion is necessary.)

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation