Delimited identifiers

Delimited identifiers are strings of no more than 32 ASCII characters enclosed in quotation marks ( " " ). Delimited identifiers allow you to create identifiers that are identical to keywords or that use special characters (such as #, &, or *) or a space.

Enclosing a name in quotation marks preserves the case of the name and allows it to be a reserved word or to contain special characters. Special characters are any characters other than letters, digits, or the underscore character. Subsequent references to a delimited identifier must also use quotation marks. To include a quotation mark character in a delimited identifier, precede it with another quotation mark.

The following code example uses a delimited identifier to create a table named "Dealer Table", where the space character is part of the name:

CREATE TABLE "Dealer Table" (name, address, city, state)
     AS 
          SELECT name, address, city, state 
          FROM customer
          WHERE state IN ('CA','NY', 'TX') ;