Meaning of & in an insert statement

Question

Suppose i am having a table employee with 2 columns emp_ID and e_name and i normally insert the rows in the table as "insert into employee values('some_value', 'some_vale')" but somewhere i saw the insert statement as "insert into employee(&emp_ID, '&e_name')" emp_ID is number type and e_name of varchar. MY QUESTION: what is the use of & in insert statement?

Answer 1

& is a special character which causes the statement to wait for an input

Answer 2

They are called Input variables.

You should take a look at this article: http://www.orafaq.com/node/515

Answer 3

It's probably a sqlplus script - & is the variable substitution character

Have a look here