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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T14:10:38+00:00

Context We’re changing our install scripts to use ant’s sql task and jdbc rather

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Context

We’re changing our install scripts to use ant’s “sql” task and jdbc rather than proprietary sql clients sqlplus (oracle) and osql (msft).

Updated: added more context. Our “base data” (seed data) consists of a collection of .sql files containing “vendor-neutral”(i.e. works both in oracle and mssql) sql statements.

The Problem

The scripts run fine, with one exception:

This sql fails in Oracle. Specifically, something (ant or jdbc driver) treats the dashes/hyphens as “beginning of a comment”–even though they are embedded in a string. Note that the same sql works fine with ant/sql and microsoft’s jdbc driver.

INSERT INTO email_client (email_client_id,generated_reply_text) VALUES(100002,'----- Original Message -----');

Related Bug

This ant bug appears to identify the problem. As it’s still open (after 8 years), I’m not hoping for a fix soon. However, because the problem appears only in oracle, it may lie with the driver.

The oracle driver: jdbc thin driver, version 10.2.0.1.0

The Question

Does anyone have a workaround which works in both mssql and oracle? (e.g. changing the offending lines to define an escape character? I don’t see an ‘escape’ on the ‘insert’ sql92 syntax)

thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After viewing the ‘SQLExec’ source and turning on verbose logging, I found a workaround:

    Workaround

    if the sql statement includes a string containing ‘–‘, place the delimiter (semi-colon) on the next line.

    This Fails

    INSERT INTO email_client (email_client_id,generated_reply_text) VALUES(100002,'----- Original Message -----');

    This Succeeds

    Note that semi-colon is on a separate line

    INSERT INTO email_client (email_client_id,generated_reply_text) VALUES(100002,'----- Original Message -----')
;

    Details

    Turning on verbose logging, I saw that when Ant came across the offending sql statement, it actually passed three sql statements in at once to the jdbc driver. The offending statement, the next statement (which also included an embedded ‘–‘), and the subsequent statement (which did not include an embedded ‘–‘).

    I gave the Ant code a quick glance and didn’t see any obvious errors. Since I wasn’t planning to patch Ant, I looked for a workaround.

    Tweaking with it I found that if I simply moved the delimiter (semicolon) to the next line for the statements with embedded ‘–‘, the scripts executed successfully.

    thanks everyone for weighing in

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