Diagnostics SQL which both Oracle and MSSQL understand

We envision a Diagnostics-proc开发者_JS百科ess in a ASP.NET WebForms application (.NET4, C#): we dispatch end-to-end a diagnostics signal from UI into the database to verify that all layers of our web-architecture are alive and well. Until now we supported Oracle and invoked

SELECT * FROM DUAL

ultimately. Going forward we will support MSSQL, we will invoke

SELECT GETDATE()

Does anyone know a universal SQL which would work on any Oracle and MSSQL instance out-of-the-box?

If all you are after is for a SQL statement to execute successfully, then you can use something benign like

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES

See this link on INFORMATION_SCHEMA support

To use this query in Oracle, you will first have to create the schema and table, even if it only has 1 column with no data.. just to get count(*) working. In going that route, it may be even better to just create a dummy table and count from it rather than from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES