Question

Everytime I try to create the following table in MySQL command line:

CREATE TABLE book(
   `book_id` int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
   `isbn` char(20),
   `title` char(20),
   `author_f_name` char(20),
   `author_l_name` char(20),
   `condition` ENUM("as new","very good","good","fair","poor"),
   `price` decimal(8,2),
   `genre` char(20)
);

I keep getting this error message:

ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL version for the right syntax to use near ‘condition ENUM(“as new”,”very good”,”good”,”fair”,”poor”), price decimal(8,2), g’ at line 6

I’ve tried using single quotes and double quotes for the ENUM options. Where did I go wrong?

Answer 1

The problem is that your column name is condition, which is a Reserved Word in MySQL.

You need to either change the name of your column or properly quote it.

See this thread for a discussion of this very issue, which explains how to quote the column name. To quote part of the post:

Yes, quote you identifiers.

The normal quotechar is the backtick (`):

create table rules (condition varchar(255))

this is specific for mysql. ANSI SQL also defines this feature, but with the double quote (") as delimiter:

create table rules ("condition" varchar(255))

because the double quote is normally a string delimiter in mysql, you have to tell mysql specifically to use the ANSI_QUOTES SQL mode, or just the ANSI mode.

set sql_mode := ‘ANSI’

you can also specify tha ansi mode at server startup.