Starting a CTE

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Starting a CTE

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 734542 More actions · Answer 1

I like the next line when developing as well, since this makes it easy to add to the query and test things.

Sean Lange SSC Guru Points: 286573 More actions · Answer 2

Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Friday, July 13, 2018 7:36 AM
I like the next line when developing as well, since this makes it easy to add to the query and test things.

Same here. I leave them on the next line in production though. If it makes things easier for development it makes sense that it makes it easier for maintenance also. :Whistling:

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Thom A SSC Guru Points: 99126 More actions · Answer 3

Sean Lange - Thursday, July 12, 2018 7:15 AM
Was helping somebody just yesterday on another site and they couldn't for the life of them figure out why their view was throwing a syntax error. The view started with a cte that had a leading semicolon. They claimed they had been wrestling the thing for a couple of days. I used Lynn's terminology that the semicolon is not a beginninator, but a terminator. And once they removed the semicolon their view was just fine. I don't know why the coding style of starting a cte became to be but it causes so much confusion.

I know exactly the topic your talking about. And totally agree. i really dislike tutorials that teach the ;WITH syntax. It gives the completely wrong impression of what the semi colon is, and makes people think that it's called a ";with expression".

A little harsh, but if Microsoft ever enforce the deprecation, I'm really looking forward to hearing people start asking why code like the following isn't working :hehe:
SELECT 'a' AS a ;WITH CTE AS( SELECT 1 AS i) SELECT i FROM CTE

Thom~

Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
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