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Reserved words and keywords

Reserved words are part of the Firebird SQL language. They cannot be used as identifiers (e.g. table or procedure names), except when enclosed in double quotes in Dialect 3. However, you should avoid this unless you have a compelling reason.

Keywords are also part of the language. They have a special meaning when used in the proper context, but they are not reserved for Firebird's own and exclusive use. You can use them as identifiers without double-quoting.

Added since InterBase 6

Newly reserved words

The following reserved words have been added to Firebird:

 BIGINT
 BIT_LENGTH
 BOTH
 CASE
 CHAR_LENGTH
 CHARACTER_LENGTH
 CLOSE
 CROSS
 CURRENT_CONNECTION
 CURRENT_ROLE
 CURRENT_TRANSACTION
 CURRENT_USER
 FETCH
 LEADING
 LOWER
 OCTET_LENGTH
 OPEN
 RECREATE
 RELEASE
 ROW_COUNT
 ROWS
 SAVEPOINT
 TRAILING
 TRIM
 USING

New keywords

The following words have been added to Firebird as non-reserved keywords:

 BACKUP
 BLOCK
 COALESCE
 COLLATION
 COMMENT
 DELETING
 DIFFERENCE
 IIF
 INSERTING
 LAST
 LEAVE
 LOCK
 NEXT
 NULLIF
 NULLS
 RESTART
 RETURNING
 SCALAR_ARRAY
 SEQUENCE
 STATEMENT
 UPDATING

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Dropped since InterBase 6

No longer reserved

The following words are no longer reserved in Firebird 2.0, but are still recognized as keywords:

 ACTION
 CASCADE
 FREE_IT
 RESTRICT
 ROLE
 TYPE
 WEEKDAY
 YEARDAY

No longer keywords

The following are no longer keywords in Firebird 2.0:

 BASENAME
 CACHE
 CHECK_POINT_LEN
 GROUP_COMMIT_WAIT
 LOG_BUF_SIZE
 LOGFILE
 NUM_LOG_BUFS
 RAW_PARTITIONS

Possibly reserved in future versions

The following words are not reserved in Firebird 2.0, but should be avoided as identifiers because they will likely be reserved in future versions:

 ABS
 BOOLEAN
 FALSE
 TRUE
 UNKNOWN

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