Place Holders

Oracle does not use question marks as place holders. It uses the host variable notation. By convention, the place holders are named Vn, where n is a number to make the place holder unique within a statement. For readability the same place holder can be used more than once, but when the statement is executed (or opened if you are using a cursor), there must still be one host variable for each place holder. For example:

     string "update ordtab " delimited by size
            "set order_no = :v1, "
            "line_no = :v2, "
            "cust_code = :v3, "
            "part_no = :v4, "
            "part_name = :v5, "
            "order_val = :v6, "
            "pay_value = :v7 "
            "where order_no = :v1 and "
            "line_no = :v2 and "
            "cust_code = :v3 " delimited by size
      into Updt-Ord-Stmt-Arr
     end-string
     move 190 to Updt-Ord-Stmt-Len

     EXEC SQL PREPARE updt_ord FROM :Updt-Ord-Stmt END-EXEC

     EXEC SQL EXECUTE updt_ord USING
         :dcl-order-no, :dcl-line-no, :dcl-cust-code,
         :dcl-part-no,  :dcl-part-name:ind-part-name,
         :dcl-order-val,:dcl-pay-value,
         :dcl-order-no, :dcl-line-no, :dcl-cust-code
     END-EXEC

where Updt-Ord-Stmt has been defined as a host variable type of VARYING.