Literal Prefixes and Suffixes

In an SQL statement, a literal is a character representation of an actual data value. For example, in the following statement, ABC, FFFF, and 10 are literals:

SELECT CharCol, BinaryCol, IntegerCol FROM MyTable

WHERE CharCol = 'ABC' AND BinaryCol = 0xFFFF AND IntegerCol = 10

Literals for some data types require special prefixes and suffixes. In the preceding example, the character literal (ABC) requires a single quotation mark (') as both a prefix and a suffix, the binary literal (FFFF) requires the characters 0x as a prefix, and the integer literal (10) does not require a prefix or suffix.

For all data types except date, time, and timestamps, interoperable applications should use the values returned in the LITERAL_PREFIX and LITERAL_SUFFIX columns in the result set created by SQLGetTypeInfo. For date, time, timestamp, and datetime interval literals, interoperable applications should use the escape sequences discussed in the previous section.