Re: ALTER TABLE requires extra parentheses for Oracle?

"Dylan Nicholson" <wizofaus_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:7d428a77.0405051726.10d5e1b2_at_posting.google.com...
> Seems that Oracle 9.2 (using MS ODBC driver) requires extra
> parentheses when adding multiple columns to a table:
>
> ALTER TABLE MyTable ADD (MyColumn1 VARCHAR(255), MyColumn2
> VARCHAR(255))
>
> vs
>
> ALTER TABLE MyTable ADD MyColumn1 VARCHAR(255), MyColumn2 VARCHAR(255)
>
> The former simply doesn't work with MS Access or SQL server. I'm
> wondering what the SQL standard is, and whether there is a way (other
> than adding columns one at a time, which is surely inefficient for a
> table with existing data) of writing the statement to work with all 3
> types of database.
>
> TIA
>
> Dylan

The driver might be "editing" your sql statements for you. Try a pass thru query. Also usually for variable characters in Oracle you should use varchar2 not varchar. The extra parens should be ignored in any database since they are just a grouping mechanism. Jim Received on Thu May 06 2004 - 04:22:24 CEST