Comments on: Fun with reserved words in MySQL 5

By: Constantin Barb

Constantin Barb — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:37:18 +0000

I often use back-ticks with MySQL, these are MySQL native for calling db names and columns.
So, I use column names like `group` or `key` with no problem.
The back-tick have more power than that
Back-ticks can be used to retrive aliases with spaces in names
Your post is old, but you may try:

SELECT id , date_format(dt_start, “%d/%m/%Y”) as `Date Start` , date_format(dt_end, “%d/%m/%Y”) as `Date End` , `repeat` as `rpt` FROM smsschedule

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:07:51 +0000

I’ve just had a similar problem. A site which has been working fine for years. I was doing some updates and started getting errors in my MySql query. Navicat showed the field name in blue and that’s what triggered me to this word being a reserved word. My site does vacation rental properties and as part of that, if you’ve got children you might order a ‘cot’. That’s on one of the forms as a field. Mysql seems to be confusing ‘cot’ with ‘cotangent’. Been working for years though before now. I’ll try the backticks and see how that goes. Thanks for the heads-up

By: radek

radek — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:18:04 +0000

should be ” you may not want to change your code “

By: radek

radek — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:17:02 +0000

I think the idea behind it is backwards / cross system compat. If you migrate your app from other DBMS / legacy programming languge you may not change your code.

By: Michael Sharman

Michael Sharman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:56:30 +0000

@radek, whilst technically this is true I’d argue the logic of ever knowingly using reserved words. It just seems like heading down a path of more trouble particularly in multi-developer environments.

It might not seem like trouble, after all what is a pair of square brackets/back ticks etc? But each and every developer who works on the project has to know and understand that you need to escape the table (or column) name. I’d bet that this would cause unnecessary headache for some like it did me today!

By: radek

radek — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:34:23 +0000

in all databases you can name tables and columns with names being keywords. That is why there are characters to escape them. In mysql these are back quotes, in mssql [] and afair “” for names with spaces

By: Ben Goosman

Ben Goosman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:27:26 +0000

I meant back tick marks. Sorry for the confusion.

By: Michael Sharman

Michael Sharman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:15:52 +0000

@Ben, tick marks (back tick) or quotes? Quotes won’t work as you’ll just return the string that was in quotes. So if I do:

SELECT ‘repeat’
FROM mytable

I will get ‘repeat’ back. Same with double quotes.

I assume you mean back ticks (`) which do work, but not really very friendly!

Still, a good solution if you aren’t able to rename your database column. Thanks for that.

I wonder if it’s considered a “bug” if MySQL actually lets you name a column with a reserved word in the first place.

By: Ben Goosman

Ben Goosman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:03:11 +0000

Tick marks should bypass the reserved word filter. e.g. `repeat`

By: Michael Sharman

Michael Sharman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:08:58 +0000

@Chris, thanks Chris. I forgot to mention that I tried adding square brackets as well as a column alias but neither worked.

I had to rename the column.