Bracketed Identifiers

The SAP ASE server supports an alternative to quoted identifiers that uses brackets to surround an identifier. The behavior of bracketed identifiers is identical to that of quoted identifiers, with the exception that you do not have to use set quoted_identifier on to use them.

When you use bracketed identifiers instead of quoted identifiers to create objects, your objectname should have at least one valid character, such as:
  • create table [table name]
  • create database [database name]

All trailing spaces are removed from the objectname, so the following are all treated identically:

[tab1<space><space>]
[tab1<space><space>]
[tab1]
[tab1<space><space><space>]
tab1

This applies to all objects that can be created using bracketed identifiers.

The following are restrictions when using delimited identifiers in SAP ASE servers:

  • A dot (.) cannot appear in an identifier name, however delimited

  • Object names as stored procedure parameters – SAP ASE stored procedure object names can be treated as strings, and do not need delimiters. For example, the following gives correct results if a table named table actually exists:

     exec sp_help 'dbo.table'

    However, the brackets are not stripped from the object name in the following:

     exec sp_help 'dbo.[table]'