SQLite Query Language: SQLite Keywords

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# SQL As Understood By SQLite

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## SQLite Keywords

The SQL standard specifies a large number of keywords which may not be used as the names of tables, indices, columns, databases, user-defined functions, collations, virtual table modules, or any other named object. The list of keywords is so long that few people can remember them all. For most SQL code, your safest bet is to never use any English language word as the name of a user-defined object.

If you want to use a keyword as a name, you need to quote it. There are four ways of quoting keywords in SQLite:

> 'keyword' |  | A keyword in single quotes is a string literal.
> "keyword" |  | A keyword in double-quotes is an identifier.
> [keyword] |  | A keyword enclosed in square brackets is an identifier. This is not standard SQL. This quoting mechanism is used by MS Access and SQL Server and is included in SQLite for compatibility.
> `keyword` |  | A keyword enclosed in grave accents (ASCII code 96) is an identifier. This is not standard SQL. This quoting mechanism is used by MySQL and is included in SQLite for compatibility.

For resilience when confronted with historical SQL statements, SQLite will sometimes bend the quoting rules above:

- If a keyword in single quotes (ex: 'key' or 'glob') is used in a context where an identifier is allowed but where a string literal is not allowed, then the token is understood to be an identifier instead of a string literal.

- If a keyword in double quotes (ex: "key" or "glob") is used in a context where it cannot be resolved to an identifier but where a string literal is allowed, then the token is understood to be a string literal instead of an identifier.

Programmers are cautioned not to use the two exceptions described in the previous bullets. We emphasize that they exist only so that old and ill-formed SQL statements will run correctly. Future versions of SQLite might raise errors instead of accepting the malformed statements covered by the exceptions above.

SQLite adds new keywords from time to time when it takes on new features. So to prevent your code from being broken by future enhancements, you should normally quote any identifier that is an English language word, even if you do not have to.

The list below shows all possible keywords used by any build of SQLite regardless of compile-time options. Most reasonable configurations use most or all of these keywords, but some keywords may be omitted when SQL language features are disabled. Applications can use the sqlite3_keyword_count(), sqlite3_keyword_name(), and sqlite3_keyword_check() interfaces to determine the keywords recognized by SQLite at run-time. Regardless of the compile-time configuration, any identifier that is not on the following 136 element list is not a keyword to the SQL parser in SQLite:

1. ABORT
2. ACTION
3. ADD
4. AFTER
5. ALL
6. ALTER
7. ANALYZE
8. AND
9. AS
10. ASC
11. ATTACH
12. AUTOINCREMENT
13. BEFORE
14. BEGIN
15. BETWEEN
16. BY
17. CASCADE
18. CASE
19. CAST
20. CHECK
21. COLLATE
22. COLUMN
23. COMMIT
24. CONFLICT
25. CONSTRAINT
26. CREATE
27. CROSS
28. CURRENT
29. CURRENT_DATE
30. CURRENT_TIME
31. CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
32. DATABASE
33. DEFAULT
34. DEFERRABLE
35. DEFERRED
36. DELETE
37. DESC
38. DETACH
39. DISTINCT
40. DO
41. DROP
42. EACH
43. ELSE
44. END
45. ESCAPE
46. EXCEPT
47. EXCLUSIVE
48. EXISTS
49. EXPLAIN
50. FAIL
51. FILTER
52. FOLLOWING
53. FOR
54. FOREIGN
55. FROM
56. FULL
57. GLOB
58. GROUP
59. HAVING
60. IF
61. IGNORE
62. IMMEDIATE
63. IN
64. INDEX
65. INDEXED
66. INITIALLY
67. INNER
68. INSERT
69. INSTEAD
70. INTERSECT
71. INTO
72. IS
73. ISNULL
74. JOIN
75. KEY
76. LEFT
77. LIKE
78. LIMIT
79. MATCH
80. NATURAL
81. NO
82. NOT
83. NOTHING
84. NOTNULL
85. NULL
86. OF
87. OFFSET
88. ON
89. OR
90. ORDER
91. OUTER
92. OVER
93. PARTITION
94. PLAN
95. PRAGMA
96. PRECEDING
97. PRIMARY
98. QUERY
99. RAISE
100. RANGE
101. RECURSIVE
102. REFERENCES
103. REGEXP
104. REINDEX
105. RELEASE
106. RENAME
107. REPLACE
108. RESTRICT
109. RIGHT
110. ROLLBACK
111. ROW
112. ROWS
113. SAVEPOINT
114. SELECT
115. SET
116. TABLE
117. TEMP
118. TEMPORARY
119. THEN
120. TO
121. TRANSACTION
122. TRIGGER
123. UNBOUNDED
124. UNION
125. UNIQUE
126. UPDATE
127. USING
128. VACUUM
129. VALUES
130. VIEW
131. VIRTUAL
132. WHEN
133. WHERE
134. WINDOW
135. WITH
136. WITHOUT