Unexpected for following namespace declaration

I ran into a problem running a simple test xquery. I hadn’t directly dealt with XML namespaces in xquery prior to this, but the documentation was clear enough:

XQUERY
declare default element namespace "http://posample.org"
for $x in db2-fn:xmlcolumn("PURCHASEORDER.PORDER")
return $x

Oops, EOF error. It needs a terminator.

XQUERY
declare default element namespace "http://posample.org"
for $x in db2-fn:xmlcolumn("PURCHASEORDER.PORDER")
return $x;

Unexpected “for” following the namespace declaration? Pardon? It turns out xquery prologs need to be terminated by a semicolon:

XQUERY
declare default element namespace "http://posample.org";
for $x in db2-fn:xmlcolumn("PURCHASEORDER.PORDER")
return $x;

Unexpected “http://posample.org”? But that’s the exact syntax given in the examples! Alas, this semicolon is distinct from the usual semicolon separator in SQL. It’s part of a single xquery statement, so what I need to do is change the SQL separator to something more exotic. This will allow xquery to be parsed correctly:

XQUERY
declare default element namespace "http://posample.org";
for $x in db2-fn:xmlcolumn("PURCHASEORDER.PORDER")
return $x@

Eureka.:)