Oracle7 Server SQL Reference

Literals

The terms literal and constant value are synonymous in this manual and refer to a fixed data value. For example, 'JACK', 'BLUE ISLAND', and '101' are all character literals. 5001 is a numeric literal. Note that character literals are enclosed in single quotation marks. The quotation marks allow Oracle7 to distinguish them from schema object names.

Many SQL statements and functions require you to specify character and numeric literal values. You can also specify literals as part of expressions and conditions. You can specify character literals with the 'text' notation and numeric literals with the integer or number notation, depending on the context of the literal. The syntactic forms of these notations appear in the following sections.