Valid in: ESQL

The DECLARE statement lists one or more names that are used in a program to identify prepared SQL statements.

The declaration of prepared statement names is not required; DECLARE statement is a comment statement, used for documentation in an embedded SQL program. No syntactic elements can be represented by host language variables.

The embedded SQL preprocessor does not generate any code for DECLARE statement. Therefore, in a language that does not allow empty control blocks (for example, COBOL, which does not allow empty IF blocks), this statement must not be the only statement in the block.