September 26, 2024: PostgreSQL 17 Released!
Supported Versions: Current (17) / 16 / 15 / 14 / 13 / 12
Development Versions: devel
Unsupported versions: 11 / 10 / 9.6 / 9.5 / 9.4 / 9.3 / 9.2 / 9.1

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE — dynamically prepare and execute a statement

Synopsis

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE string

Description

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE immediately prepares and executes a dynamically specified SQL statement, without retrieving result rows.

Parameters

string

A literal string or a host variable containing the SQL statement to be executed.

Notes

In typical usage, the string is a host variable reference to a string containing a dynamically-constructed SQL statement. The case of a literal string is not very useful; you might as well just write the SQL statement directly, without the extra typing of EXECUTE IMMEDIATE.

If you do use a literal string, keep in mind that any double quotes you might wish to include in the SQL statement must be written as octal escapes (\042) not the usual C idiom \". This is because the string is inside an EXEC SQL section, so the ECPG lexer parses it according to SQL rules not C rules. Any embedded backslashes will later be handled according to C rules; but \" causes an immediate syntax error because it is seen as ending the literal.

Examples

Here is an example that executes an INSERT statement using EXECUTE IMMEDIATE and a host variable named command:

sprintf(command, "INSERT INTO test (name, amount, letter) VALUES ('db: ''r1''', 1, 'f')");
EXEC SQL EXECUTE IMMEDIATE :command;

Compatibility

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE is specified in the SQL standard.

Submit correction

If you see anything in the documentation that is not correct, does not match your experience with the particular feature or requires further clarification, please use this form to report a documentation issue.