Thanks, this worked great!

Thanks, that makes sense (although it does seem like parts of the documentation are somewhat misleading and could be improved.)

As a follow up question, is there an idiomatic way of checking whether a dynamic SQL SELECT query returns any values then?

Considering the complexity of the task of parsing, I'm not sure it makes too much sense to write one from scratch. I was hoping to see if someone else had already done the work or tried it in the past.

In terms of is it necessary, not strictly no, but the modern parentheses syntax is much easier to read, maintain and modify.