Compliance to ANSI Standards

Certain behaviors defined by the SQL standards are incompatible with SAP ASE applications. Transact-SQL provides set options that allow you to toggle these behaviors.

By default, compliant behavior is enabled for all Embedded SQL™ precompiler applications.

• Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Flagger
  For customers writing applications that must conform to the ANSI SQL standard, SAP ASE provides a set fipsflagger option.
• Chained Transactions and Isolation Levels
  SAP ASE provides SQL standard-compliant “chained” transaction behavior as an option.
• Identifier Compliance to ANSI Standards
  To be compliant with entry-level ANSI SQL, identifiers cannot begin with a pound sign (#), have more than 18 characters, or contain lowercase letters. SAP ASE supports delimited identifiers for table, view, and column names which can be used to avoid certain restrictions on object names.
• SQL Standard-Style Comments
  In Transact-SQL, comments are delimited by “/*” and “*/”, and can be nested. Transact-SQL also supports SQL standard-style comments, which consist of any string beginning with two connected minus signs, a comment, and a terminating new line.
• Right Truncation of Character Strings
  The string_rtruncation set option controls silent truncation of character strings for SQL standard compatibility. Enable this option to prohibit silent truncation and enforce SQL standard behavior.
• Permissions Required for update and delete Statements
  The ansi_permissions set option determines permissions that are required for delete and update statements.
• Arithmetic Errors
  The arithabort and arithignore options for set allow compliance with the ANSI SQL standard.
• Synonymous Keywords
  Several keywords added for SQL standard compatibility are synonymous with existing Transact-SQL keywords.
• Treatment of Nulls
  The set option ansinull determines whether or not evaluation of null-valued operands in SQL equality (=) or inequality (!=) comparisons and aggregate functions is SQL-standard-compliant.