Making a switch between technologies is sometimes difficult and it always helps to establish parallels between them during the learning phase. Recently, I met someone who had worked on object-oriented programming languages like C# and had to start learning T-SQL in order to work on a new Agile project that was coming his way.
In order to help him get started, the first thing I did was to establish a parallel on how to declare new variables in a module/script. Just as one can declare more than one variable in a single statement in C#, one can do so in T-SQL.
This actually came as a surprise to a few of my team-mates, which is why I decided to write it up as a T-SQL basics post.
So, here’s how to declare multiple variables spanning multiple data-types in a single DECLARE statement:
USE tempdb; GO DECLARE @iVar1 INT = 10, @iVar2 INT = 05, @dVar DECIMAL(19,4) = 10.05, @sVar VARCHAR(20) = 'Ten'; SELECT @iVar1 AS IntegerValue1, @iVar2 AS IntegerValue2, @dVar AS DecimalValue, @sVar AS StringValue; GO
Declaring multiple variables and assigning values to them in a single statement
Do keep in mind though that starting SQL Server 2008, the DECLARE statement can generate exceptions if you perform declarations and initialization/assignment in the same statement .
Until we meet next time,
Be courteous. Drive responsibly.