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Identifiers

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Identifiers are used to specify the names of columns (sometimes referred to as properties), catalogs, and aliases. This is in contrast to literals, which are used to specify string and numeric values.

Identifiers can be up to 128 characters in length.

There are two types of identifiers, distinguished by the characters used in the identifier name:

  • Regular identifiers contain only the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and underscore, and begin with a letter. Regular identifiers do not need to be enclosed in double quotation marks.
  • Delimited identifiers can contain any valid Unicode character, and must be enclosed in double quotation marks.

Identifiers that are URNs, because they contain special characters, are always delimited identifiers, and must be enclosed in double quotation marks.

Note

The asterisk "*" can be used as a special column specifier in some places in the SharePoint Portal Server SQL syntax. Although it is not a regular identifier, it does not require double quotation marks.