May be my explanation was not clear, but our brother glickjd is trying to insert ASC or DESC in his query with a placeholder, right? This method of building queries can be dangerous, as well described by dws in his post, am I right?

Ciao, Valerio

Update: thanks to Aristotle for explaining me why I was wrong.

No, his problem is not with quotes. The database driver will interally "supply" these automatically.

dws' fine node explains the dangers in the placeholder emulation of some DBDs whose underlying database engine does not support those natively. These DBDs will allow you say things like SELECT * FROM ? where the placeholder is a stand-in for the table name or even SELECT * ? where you pass "FROM tbl ORDER BY name" as a "value".

The danger here is that no database does (and can) support this natively, so if you move from mySQL (emulated placeholders) to Oracle (native placeholders) your code will break. Placeholders must be used only for values.

As the original poster in this case does. He does not to construct any other part of the query with them.

Makeshifts last the longest.