November 17, 2004
Bloody SQL Server

It's just given me the error message:

Server: Msg 170, Level 15, State 1, Line 3
Line 3: Incorrect syntax near '('.

Line three is, of course, a comment. The full script is over fifteen hundred lines long, and has a lot of parenthisies in it. How am I supposed to work out what's wrong?

Posted to Software development by Simon Brunning at November 17, 2004 10:05 AM
Comments

Three or four pints of Hoegarden will loosen up those SQL glands and the answer will simply appear to you.

Posted by: Steve on November 17, 2004 10:59 AM

Binary chop is your friend :-)

Posted by: Mark Russell on November 17, 2004 01:04 PM

Just to add oil to the fire, I've had a couple of times where I got that message and didn't have ANY perenthisis in the query.

This might help:

Stick the query in a text editor and add PLENTY of carrage returns like,

SELECT *
FROM table
INNER Join table2
ON table1.id=table2.id
WHERE table1....
AND table2...
ORDER BY table1.id ASC,

and try the query again. You should get a line reference thats a bit closer to the error.

Possibly.

Posted by: Richard@Home on November 17, 2004 01:04 PM

Yeah, binary chop was the answer. I commented half the script out, which told me that the error was in the first half of the script. So I commented out half of *that*, and so on and so forth.

Bloody SQL server.

Posted by: Simon Brunning on November 17, 2004 01:24 PM

Can I just say that it serves you right for having a 1500 line SQL Server script?

I just hope it doesn't have any T-SQL in it, because then you are headed straight for the sevcnth level of the inferno. See http://www.halfcooked.com/mt/archives/000384.html

Posted by: Andy Todd on November 17, 2004 09:49 PM

Oh no - it's utterly standard ANSI SQL. It would (I think) run unaltered on a '400.

I don't know any T-SQL, and I don't intend to learn any.

I did originally have a bunch of separate scripts, but running ten scripts, one after the other, time after time was getting irritating. I'm sure there's a compromise, but not knowing SQL Server, I don't know what it is.

Posted by: Simon Brunning on November 18, 2004 08:42 AM
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