From the course: Database Foundations: Intro to Databases

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Reserved keywords

Reserved keywords

From the course: Database Foundations: Intro to Databases

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Reserved keywords

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- [Instructor] The SQL language includes a large number of commands and other keywords that have special meaning to the database engine. We've already seen a few of them, words like Create, Alter, Schema, Table. These command keywords, instruct the server to do something, to build something or edit something. Words like these are called reserved keywords, and it's important to avoid using them in the names of your database objects, like tables or columns. It can be downright confusing to read if you do use these reserved keywords as object names. Consider the command create table, create.table. Here we're asking for a table named table and a schema named create. While you can kind of make sense of what's going on, it's a struggle. Worse, the database engine can get confused as it tries to interpret what you're asking for. In fact, in order to actually accomplish this task, you'd have to wrap the names in square brackets…

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