With a certain regularity, Sybase users ask questions like "How can I use dynamic SQL in ASE ?" in the Sybase-related newsgroups. There are a number of different answers to this question.
First, if you're running ASE 12.0 or later, you can use the execute immediate feature, which gives you full dynamic SQL capabilites, as it lets you execute dynamically generated SQL command strings. A simple example:
declare @c varchar(25) select @c = "select getdate()" exec (@c)
While this example is hardly something to get excited about, execute-immediate has opened a new dimension to the sort of thing you can do with T-SQL. The most important characteristic is that you can now create stored procedures (and triggers) that are independent of the schema of tables -- a highly useful thing to do.
My book "Tips, Tricks & Recipes for Sybase ASE" has a chapter dedicated to execute-immediate, describing not only the inner workings, but also a wide range of possible applications. This is probably the most complete writeup about execute-immediate that's available.
