About this book

The Adaptive Server Reference Manual includes four guides to Sybase^® Adaptive Server^® Enterprise and the Transact-SQL^® language:

Building Blocks describes the “parts” of Transact-SQL: datatypes, built-in functions, global variables, expressions and identifiers, reserved words, and SQLSTATE errors. Before you can use Transact-SQL sucessfully, you must understand what these building blocks do and how they affect the results of Transact-SQL statements.
Commands provides reference information about the Transact-SQL commands, which you use to create statements.
Procedures provides reference information about system procedures, catalog stored procedures, extended stored procedures, and dbcc stored procedures. All procedures are created using Transact-SQL statements.
Tables provides reference information about the system tables, which store information about your server, databases, users, and other details of your server. It also provides information about the tables in the dbccdb and dbccalt databases.

Conventions

The following sections describe conventions used in the Reference Manual guides.

SQL is a free-form language. There are no rules about the number of words you can put on a line or where you must break a line. However, for readability, all examples and most syntax statements in this manual are formatted so that each clause of a statement begins on a new line. Clauses that have more than one part extend to additional lines, which are indented. Complex commands are formatted using modified Backus Naur Form (BNF) notation.

Table 1 shows the conventions for syntax statements that appear in this manual:

**Table 1: Font and syntax conventions for this manual**
Element	Example
Command names,procedure names, utility names, database names, datatypes, and other keywords display in sans serif font.	select sp_configure master database
Book names, file names, variables, and path names are in italics.	System Administration Guide sql.ini file column_name $SYBASE/ASE directory
Variables—or words that stand for values that you fill in—when they are part of a query or statement, are in italics in Courier font.	`select column_name from table_name where search_conditions`
Type parentheses as part of the command.	`compute row_aggregate (column_name)`
Double colon, equals sign indicates that the syntax is written in BNF notation. Do not type this symbol. Indicates “is defined as”.	`::=`
Curly braces mean that you must choose at least one of the enclosed options. Do not type the braces.	`{cash, check, credit}`
Brackets mean that to choose one or more of the enclosed options is optional. Do not type the brackets.	`[cash \| check \| credit]`
The comma means you may choose as many of the options shown as you want. Separate your choices with commas as part of the command.	`cash, check, credit`
The pipe or vertical bar ( \| ) means you may select only one of the options shown.	`cash \| check \| credit`
An ellipsis (...) means that you can repeat the last unit as many times as you like.	`buy thing = price [cash \| check \| credit] [, thing = price [cash \| check \| credit] ]...` You must buy at least one thing and give its price. You may choose a method of payment: one of the items enclosed in square brackets. You may also choose to buy additional things: as many of them as you like. For each thing you buy, give its name, its price, and (optionally) a method of payment.

Syntax statements (displaying the syntax and all options for a command) appear as follows:
```
sp_dropdevice [device_name]
```
For a command with more options:
```
select column_name 
    from table_name 
    where search_conditions
```
In syntax statements, keywords (commands) are in normal font and identifiers are in lowercase. Italic font shows user-supplied words.
Examples showing the use of Transact-SQL commands are printed like this:
```
select * from publishers
```

Examples of output from the computer appear as follows:

pub_id    pub_name                city          state 
-------   ---------------------   -----------   ----- 
0736      New Age Books           Boston        MA 
0877      Binnet & Hardley        Washington    DC 
1389      Algodata Infosystems    Berkeley      CA 

(3 rows affected)

In this manual, most of the examples are in lowercase. However, you can disregard case when typing Transact-SQL keywords. For example, SELECT, Select, and select are the same.

Adaptive Server sensitivity to the case of database objects, such as table names, depends on the sort order installed on Adaptive Server. You can change case sensitivity for single-byte character sets by reconfiguring the Adaptive Server sort order. For more information, see the System Administration Guide.