Jeff Moden (5/10/2013)
I understand what the semi-colon can do so far as ending a statement but it worked just fine before without it before. I don't know what your formatting convention is but I don't need a semi-colon at the end of even the longest of queries to tell me that a new query has started whether the code has any comments or not.
I come from a COBOL environment where (at one time) every sentence had to be terminated by a period. When I started learning SQL (T-SQL) I saw the optional semicolon and just started using it, and I still do today.