Embedded SQL Companion Guide > Embedded SQL Companion Guide > Introducing the Embedded SQL Companion Guide > Conventions > Statements and Commands
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Statements and Commands
Ingres documentation handles statements and commands as follows.
Terminology
The documentation observes the following distinction in terminology:
• A command is an operation that you execute at the operating system level.
• A statement is an operation that you embed in a program or execute interactively from an Ingres terminal monitor.
A statement can be written in Ingres/4GL, a host programming language (such as Fortran), or a database query language (SQL or QUEL).
Syntax
This manual uses the following conventions to describe statement and command syntax specifications:
Convention
Usage
Boldface
Indicates keywords, symbols or punctuation that you must type as shown
Italics
Represent a variable name for which you must supply an actual value
[ ] (brackets)
Indicate an optional item
{ } (braces)
Indicate an optional item that you can repeat as many times as appropriate
| (vertical bar)
Used between items in a list to indicate that you should choose one of the items
The following example illustrates the syntax conventions:
create table tablename (columnname  format
           {,columnname format})
           [with_clause]
Last modified date: 11/09/2022