BEGIN statement [TSQL]

Specifies a compound statement.

Syntax

BEGIN
statement-list
END

statement-list : 
sql-statement
| variable-declaration
| cursor-declaration
| temporary-table-declaration

variable-declaration : see the DECLARE statement

cursor-declaration : see the DECLARE CURSOR statement

temporary-table-declaration : see the DECLARE LOCAL TEMPORARY TABLE statement

Parameters

statement-list
A list of statements and declarations.

Remarks

A BEGIN statement allows one or more SQL statements to be grouped together and treated as a unit, and starts with the keyword BEGIN and ends with the keyword END.

Error handling is different for Transact-SQL compound statements.

Privileges

None.

Side effects

None.

Standards

ANSI/ISO SQL Standard
BEGIN, which identifies a compound statement, comprises part of optional ANSI/ISO SQL Language Feature P002.

Example

The example below declares the following variables:

v1 as an INT with the initial setting of 5.
v2 and v3 as CHAR(10), both with an initial value of abc.

BEGIN
   DECLARE v1 INT = 5
   DECLARE v2, v3 CHAR(10) = 'abc'
			// ...
END