Naming Conventions for DB2 under UNIX and PC Hosts

For general information, see SAS Names and Support for DBMS Names.

The PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= and PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= options determine how this interface handles case sensitivity, spaces, and special characters. (For information about these options, see LIBNAME Statement for Relational Databases.) DB2 is not case sensitive, and all names default to uppercase.

DB2 objects include tables, views, columns, and indexes. They follow these naming conventions.

• A name can begin with a letter or one of these symbols: dollar sign ($), number or pound sign (#), or at symbol (@).
• A table name or a column name must be from 1 to 128 characters long.
• A name can contain the letters A to Z, any valid letter with a diacritic, numbers from 0 to 9, underscore (_), dollar sign ($), number or pound sign (#), or at symbol (@).
• Names are not case sensitive. For example, the table names CUSTOMER and Customer are the same, but object names are converted to uppercase when they are entered. If a name is enclosed in quotation marks, the name is case sensitive.
• A name cannot be a DB2 reserved word or an SQL-reserved word, such as WHERE or VIEW.
• A name cannot be the same as another DB2 object that has the same type.

Schema and database names have similar conventions, except that they are each limited to 30 and 8 characters respectively. For more information, see your DB2 SQL reference documentation.