Naming Conventions for Oracle

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.) Oracle is case sensitive, and all names default to uppercase.

You can name such Oracle objects as tables, views, columns, and indexes. They follow these naming conventions.

• A name must be from 1 to 30 characters long. Database names are limited to 8 characters, and link names are limited to 128 characters.
• A name must begin with a letter. However, if you enclose the name in double quotation marks, it can begin with any character.
• A name can contain the letters A through Z, the digits 0 through 9, the underscore (_), $, and #. If the name appears within double quotation marks, it can contain any characters, except double quotation marks.
• To preserve special characters in the user name (USER=) in the LIBNAME statement, you must enclose the name in single quotation marks and then enclose everything in double quotation marks.
• Names are not case sensitive. For example, CUSTOMER and Customer are the same. However, if you enclose an object name in double quotation marks, it is case sensitive.
• A name cannot be an Oracle reserved word.
• A name cannot be the same as another Oracle object in the same schema.