Cte with semicolon issue

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Hi Folks!!

I have a doubt on CTE..If we are using CTE inside SP..Previous statement must be terminated with Semicolon(;)..Why??

declare @date varchar(10)
set @date=GETDATE();

WITH CTEQuery AS (
SELECT CAST('23 Mar 2014' AS DATETIME) AS dt
UNION ALL
SELECT DATEADD(dd, 1, dt)
FROM CTEQuery s
WHERE DATEADD(dd, 1, dt) <= CAST('26 Jun 2014' AS DATETIME)
)
select * from CTEQuery

Thanks in Advance!!

What I have tried:

I don't know the reason why Semicolon is required .I just want to know the Reason .

Posted 11-Mar-16 0:15am

Member 11931581

Updated 11-Mar-16 0:37am

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jaket-cp 11-Mar-16 7:17am

On a side note: possibly get in the habit of using the semicolon statement terminator for all statements.

"Not ending Transact-SQL statements with a semicolon" has been put in the list of
Features Not Supported in a Future Version of SQL Server
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729(v=sql.120).aspx

Not saying it is going to happen any time soon though.

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Tomas Takac · Answer 1 · 2016-03-11T00:37:00

That is by design:

Quote:
When a CTE is used in a statement that is part of a batch, the statement before it must be followed by a semicolon.

You must read the documentation[^] carefully.

I guess they needed that semicolon to parse the statement correctly as WITH can be used for other things too e.g. hints in selects:

SQL

SELECT * FROM MyTable WITH (NOLOCK)

or options in some commands:

SQL

ALTER TABLE MyTable REBUILD WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE).

It is similar to MERGE[^] command which must always be terminated by a semicolon.