The closest thing I can think of is a package variable with a scope that allows access across an entire package, and to refer to such as a global variable has at least some validity during package execution, at least at the level of scope of the package anyway. But to think of it as being global outside of that package wouldn't make any sense. You might consider a declared variable within a T-SQL script to be global, but it wouldn't be changeable from within a package that gets executed by the script, assuming that can be done, and that the variable is somehow passed to the package in some way (perhaps dynamic SQL ?), but then, that isn't really applicable to this problem in the first place. Maybe the person just figured a declared variable could be at least "thought of" as global, to the extent that once declared, it's available across the rest of the T-SQL script up to the next GO statement. Maybe it just depends on how they want to define the word global.