Is this an intialization?

[Akhilesh Trivedi]

select @myvariable     = 'A' 

Is this an initialization in query language?

[Martin Vajsar]

This certainly isn't valid in PL/SQL, and I'd say not even in sql*plus scripts. I'd say it looks like TransactSQL, but I don't have any experience with it.

Are you porting code from other databases to Oracle? In PL/SQL, you can assign values to variables using the assignment operator:

declare myvariable varchar2(10); begin myvariable := 'A'; end; /