What is the alternate of Goto in Azure Synapse - azure-synapse

Question

I am using goto in azure synapse to skip certain code and jump to the label, its not working as expected. what is the alternate for that.

Answer 1

As GOTO is not supported in Azure Synapse Analytics, dedicated SQL pools, you need to write procedure code that does not rely on GOTO.
This example is taken from the help page for GOTO and works perfectly fine on normal SQL Server:
DECLARE #Counter int;
SET #Counter = 1;
WHILE #Counter < 10
BEGIN
SELECT #Counter
SET #Counter = #Counter + 1
IF #Counter = 4 GOTO Branch_One --Jumps to the first branch.
IF #Counter = 5 GOTO Branch_Two --This will never execute.
END
Branch_One:
SELECT 'Jumping To Branch One.'
GOTO Branch_Three; --This will prevent Branch_Two from executing.
Branch_Two:
SELECT 'Jumping To Branch Two.'
Branch_Three:
SELECT 'Jumping To Branch Three.';
This is that same code refactored without GOTO, using IF ELSE control flow language and BEGIN END blocks to contain multiple statements and BREAK to exit the loop:
DECLARE #Counter INT;
SET #Counter = 1;
WHILE #Counter < 10
BEGIN
SELECT #Counter
SET #Counter = #Counter + 1
IF #Counter = 4
BEGIN
SELECT 'Jumping To Branch One.'
SELECT 'Jumping To Branch Three.';
BREAK
END
IF #Counter = 5
BEGIN
SELECT 'Jumping To Branch Two.'
END
END
There would be multiple ways to do it, eg write some of the inner code as functions or stored procedures. This is just a simple example. I have to say, I have not written a GOTO statement in SQL code for years as it tends to lead to so-called spaghetti code and can be hard to debug.