topic Re: How to pass a string as as parameter for EXECUTE IMMEDIATE? in Data Engineering

How to pass a string as as parameter for EXECUTE IMMEDIATE?

Atomium — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:09:58 GMT

I'm taking the SQL programming and procedural logic course on the academy.

One of the lessons concerns EXECUTE IMMEDIATE. It's a bit confusing: the slides use a syntax with (?) as parameter marker, while the video demo uses a syntax with double pipe.

So first question: which of these two syntaxes is the preferred one?

In the lab environment, I tried to use EXECUTE IMMEDIATE to dynamically select a column from a table, passing the name of the column as a parameter. This is the code:

DECLARE OR REPLACE column_name STRING = "o_orderpriority"; DECLARE OR REPLACE sql_string STRING = "SELECT (?) FROM orders LIMIT 10"; EXECUTE IMMEDIATE sql_string USING column_name;

The result is a table with a column that contains 10 times the word o_orderpriority.

Second question: is there a way to make EXECUTE IMMEDIATE interpret the parameter value as a column name, and not as a literal string?

Re: How to pass a string as as parameter for EXECUTE IMMEDIATE?

bianca_unifeye — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:27:40 GMT

This is expected behaviour.

? parameter markers (with USING) are only for values, not for SQL identifiers.
When you pass a column name via ?, Databricks correctly treats it as a string literal, not as a column reference.

That’s why:

SELECT (?) FROM orders

returns a column containing the literal text o_orderpriority.

If you need to dynamically select a column name, you must build it into the SQL string:

SET sql_string =
  'SELECT ' || column_name || ' FROM orders LIMIT 10';

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE sql_string;

Rule of thumb:

Identifiers (tables, columns) → string concatenation
Values → ? + USING

This separation is intentional for correctness and SQL injection safety.

Re: How to pass a string as as parameter for EXECUTE IMMEDIATE?

Atomium — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:44:03 GMT

Thank you for your clear explanation!

The lab example uses a parameter to pass the name of a column to sort on. That got me on the wrong foot...