Question

After reading a couple of answers and comments on some SQL questions here, and also hearing that a friend of mine works at a place which has a policy which bans them, I’m wondering if there’s anything wrong with using backticks around field names in MySQL.

That is:

SELECT `id`, `name`, `anotherfield` ... -- vs -- SELECT id, name, anotherfield ... 

Answer 1

Using backticks permits you to use alternative characters. In query writing it’s not such a problem, but if one assumes you can just use backticks, I would assume it lets you get away with ridiculous stuff like

SELECT `id`, `my name`, `another field` , `field,with,comma`  

Which does of course generate badly named tables.

If you’re just being concise I don’t see a problem with it, you’ll note if you run your query as such

EXPLAIN EXTENDED Select foo,bar,baz  

The generated warning that comes back will have back-ticks and fully qualified table names. So if you’re using query generation features and automated re-writing of queries, backticks would make anything parsing your code less confused.

I think however, instead of mandating whether or not you can use backticks, they should have a standard for names. It solves more ‘real’ problems.