TSQL for Oracle Developers

Today I needed to do some coding in MS SQL and discovered some differences between Oracle and MS SQL worth mentioning.

As you know, Oracle allows altering more than one column in a single command. For ex:

ALTER TABLE scott.emp MODIFY (
   hiredate NOT NULL,
   deptno NUMBER(4) NOT NULL
);

In TSQL, however, you will have to execute two commands:

ALTER TABLE emp ALTER COLUMN hiredate DATE NOT NULL;
ALTER TABLE emp ALTER COLUMN deptno INT NOT NULL;

A couple of more differences:

TSQL uses ALTER COLUMN, Oracle SQL – MODIFY
TSQL, unlike Oracle SQL, cannot alter column null-ability without knowing its data type

I hope this short post will help Oracle developers to be productive with MS SQL if the opportunity presents.

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