Chapter 1. SQL Syntax

1.1.1. Identifiers and Key Words

Tokens such as SELECT, UPDATE, or VALUES in the example above are examples of key words, that is, words that have a fixed meaning in the SQL language. The tokens MY_TABLE and A are examples of identifiers. They identify names of tables, columns, or other database objects, depending on the command they are used in. Therefore they are sometimes simply called "names". Key words and identifiers have the same lexical structure, meaning that one cannot know whether a token is an identifier or a key word without knowing the language. A complete list of key words can be found in Appendix B.

SQL identifiers and key words must begin with a letter (a-z, but also letters with diacritical marks and non-Latin letters) or an underscore (_). Subsequent characters in an identifier or key word can be letters, digits (0-9), or underscores, although the SQL standard will not define a key word that contains digits or starts or ends with an underscore.

The system uses no more than NAMEDATALEN-1 characters of an identifier; longer names can be written in commands, but they will be truncated. By default, NAMEDATALEN is 64 so the maximum identifier length is 63 (but at the time PostgreSQL is built, NAMEDATALEN can be changed in src/include/postgres_ext.h).

Identifier and key word names are case insensitive. Therefore

UPDATE MY_TABLE SET A = 5;

can equivalently be written as

uPDaTE my_TabLE SeT a = 5;

A convention often used is to write key words in upper case and names in lower case, e.g.,

UPDATE my_table SET a = 5;

There is a second kind of identifier: the delimited identifier or quoted identifier. It is formed by enclosing an arbitrary sequence of characters in double-quotes ("). A delimited identifier is always an identifier, never a key word. So "select" could be used to refer to a column or table named "select", whereas an unquoted select would be taken as a key word and would therefore provoke a parse error when used where a table or column name is expected. The example can be written with quoted identifiers like this:

UPDATE "my_table" SET "a" = 5;

Quoted identifiers can contain any character other than a double quote itself. To include a double quote, write two double quotes. This allows constructing table or column names that would otherwise not be possible, such as ones containing spaces or ampersands. The length limitation still applies.

Quoting an identifier also makes it case-sensitive, whereas unquoted names are always folded to lower case. For example, the identifiers FOO, foo and "foo" are considered the same by PostgreSQL, but "Foo" and "FOO" are different from these three and each other. [1]

1.1.2. Constants

There are three kinds of implicitly-typed constants in PostgreSQL: strings, bit strings, and numbers. Constants can also be specified with explicit types, which can enable more accurate representation and more efficient handling by the system. The implicit constants are described below; explicit constants are discussed afterwards.

SELECT 'foo'
 'bar';

SELECT 'foobar';

SELECT 'foo'      'bar';

digits
 digits.[digits][e[+-]digits]
 [digits].digits[e[+-]digits]
 digitse[+-]digits

REAL '1.23'  -- string style
 1.23::REAL   -- PostgreSQL (historical) style

type 'string'
 'string'::type
 CAST ( 'string' AS type )

typename ( 'string' )

'{ val1 delim val2 delim ... }'

'{{1,2,3},{4,5,6},{7,8,9}}'

1.1.3. Operators

An operator is a sequence of up to NAMEDATALEN-1 (63 by default) characters from the following list:

+ - * / < > = ~ ! @ # % ^ & | ` ? $

• $ (dollar) cannot be a single-character operator, although it can be part of a multiple-character operator name.

• -- and /* cannot appear anywhere in an operator name, since they will be taken as the start of a comment.

• A multiple-character operator name cannot end in + or -, unless the name also contains at least one of these characters:

  ~ ! @ # % ^ & | ` ? $

  For example, @- is an allowed operator name, but *- is not. This restriction allows PostgreSQL to parse SQL-compliant queries without requiring spaces between tokens.

When working with non-SQL-standard operator names, you will usually need to separate adjacent operators with spaces to avoid ambiguity. For example, if you have defined a left unary operator named @, you cannot write X*@Y; you must write X* @Y to ensure that PostgreSQL reads it as two operator names not one.

1.1.4. Special Characters

Some characters that are not alphanumeric have a special meaning that is different from being an operator. Details on the usage can be found at the location where the respective syntax element is described. This section only exists to advise the existence and summarize the purposes of these characters.

• A dollar sign ($) followed by digits is used to represent the positional parameters in the body of a function definition. In other contexts the dollar sign may be part of an operator name.

• Parentheses (()) have their usual meaning to group expressions and enforce precedence. In some cases parentheses are required as part of the fixed syntax of a particular SQL command.

• Brackets ([]) are used to select the elements of an array. See Section 5.12 for more information on arrays.

• Commas (,) are used in some syntactical constructs to separate the elements of a list.

• The semicolon (;) terminates an SQL command. It cannot appear anywhere within a command, except within a string constant or quoted identifier.

• The colon (:) is used to select "slices" from arrays. (See Section 5.12.) In certain SQL dialects (such as Embedded SQL), the colon is used to prefix variable names.

• The asterisk (*) has a special meaning when used in the SELECT command or with the COUNT aggregate function.

• The period (.) is used in floating-point constants, and to separate schema, table, and column names.

1.1.5. Comments

A comment is an arbitrary sequence of characters beginning with double dashes and extending to the end of the line, e.g.:

-- This is a standard SQL92 comment

Alternatively, C-style block comments can be used:

/* multiline comment
  * with nesting: /* nested block comment */
  */

where the comment begins with /* and extends to the matching occurrence of */. These block comments nest, as specified in SQL99 but unlike C, so that one can comment out larger blocks of code that may contain existing block comments.

A comment is removed from the input stream before further syntax analysis and is effectively replaced by whitespace.

1.1.6. Lexical Precedence

Table 1-1 shows the precedence and associativity of the operators in PostgreSQL. Most operators have the same precedence and are left-associative. The precedence and associativity of the operators is hard-wired into the parser. This may lead to non-intuitive behavior; for example the Boolean operators < and > have a different precedence than the Boolean operators <= and >=. Also, you will sometimes need to add parentheses when using combinations of binary and unary operators. For instance

SELECT 5 ! - 6;

will be parsed as

SELECT 5 ! (- 6);

because the parser has no idea -- until it is too late -- that ! is defined as a postfix operator, not an infix one. To get the desired behavior in this case, you must write

SELECT (5 !) - 6;

This is the price one pays for extensibility.

Note that the operator precedence rules also apply to user-defined operators that have the same names as the built-in operators mentioned above. For example, if you define a "+" operator for some custom data type it will have the same precedence as the built-in "+" operator, no matter what yours does.

When a schema-qualified operator name is used in the OPERATOR syntax, as for example in

SELECT 3 OPERATOR(pg_catalog.+) 4;

the OPERATOR construct is taken to have the default precedence shown in Table 1-1 for "any other" operator. This is true no matter which specific operator name appears inside OPERATOR().