ERROR [37000] [IBM][CLI Driver] CLI0118E Invalid SQL syntax. SQLSTATE=37000

Question

I have a simple SQL statement query that is executed as command from C# code. It is targetting DB2. I created variables for the server/schemas as follows. It throws error.

private const string DB2Query
            = @"SELECT Name as Name FROM {Schema}.Application WHERE ID = ?";

I get this error.

ERROR [37000] [IBM][CLI Driver] CLI0118E Invalid SQL syntax. SQLSTATE=37000

However, I don't get that error when executing from SQL as follows:

SELECT Name as Name 
FROM MyServer..FOR3.Application 
WHERE ID = 'MOM'

To support this, I tried to also do something like below in code, still throws different error.

 private const string DB2Query
                    = @"SELECT Name as Name FROM {ServerName}..{Schema}.Application WHERE ID = ?";

It throws error on this line of code:

DataApplicationBlockHelper<string>.Get(db, dbCommand, Obj);

UPDATE

I found the culprit. It's not replacing the {Schema} placeholder. When I actually removed that from query and placed the schema name, it worked like a charm. It's a .net thing I believe? Can someone please help how to replace {Schema} with a value fetched from web.config?

Answer 1

While I can't really speak to the syntax of DB2 queries themselves, so I'll rely on your assertion that the query itself should work...

What you have in C# is simply a string and nothing more:

private const string DB2Query = @"SELECT Name as Name FROM {Schema}.Application WHERE ID = ?";

Note that there's no need for the @ operator in this string definition, so let's simplify:

private const string DB2Query = "SELECT Name as Name FROM {Schema}.Application WHERE ID = ?";

While this string appears intuitively to have a placeholder that can be replaced with a value, if there's no code which does that anywhere then it won't happen. For that you have a few options. For example, you can use a placeholder that string.Format() understands:

private const string DB2Query = "SELECT Name as Name FROM {0}.Application WHERE ID = ?";

And then later in a method somewhere, when you want to use that string, apply the format value to it:

var sql = string.Format(DB2Query, someVariable);

In this case someVariable (which doesn't even need to be a variable and could be a string literal) would be used to replace the placeholder in the string.

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Or, if you want to keep the named placeholder, you can potentially replace it manually:

private const string DB2Query = "SELECT Name as Name FROM {Schema}.Application WHERE ID = ?";

and later in a method:

var sql = DB2Query.Replace("{Schema}", someVariable);

This would observably accomplish the same thing, perhaps with an extremely minor performance difference.

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You could also take advantage of both approaches by using the more recent language feature of string interpolation. This would use the $ operator to apply format placeholders in place directly. I don't think you can use this in a const, it's more for a local variable. Something like this:

var sql = $"SELECT Name as Name FROM {someVariable}.Application WHERE ID = ?";

This would still perform the same replacement, putting someVariable where the placeholder is, it's just using a more concise syntax than a call to string.Format(). One thing to note about this syntax is that it makes it look more like this interpolation is happening directly in-place on the string. It's still a multi-step process behind the scenes, which is why it likely won't work on a const or on class members at all (and should I imagine produce a compiler error).

Remember that strings are immutable, so any operation you perform which modifies a string would be returning a new string rather than modifying the existing one in place.

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In any case, you'll of course also need to apply your query parameter for the ? placeholder. Note that what C# considers to be a placeholder in a string formatting/interpolating operation and what DB2 considers to be a placeholder for a query parameter are two entirely different things which happen at different times in different environments. (One in the .NET runtime, one in the database server's query execution.) But again, I'm relying on your assertion that the database query itself works and the only problem we're focusing on here is the C# string placeholder.