Question

For some reason, the developers at a new company I’m working for decided to name their columns “ignore” and “exists”. Now when I run MySQL queries with those words in the where clause, I get a syntax error; however, I can’t seem to figure out how to reference those columns without running into an error. I tried setting them as strings, but that doesn’t make any sense.

Help?

Also, is there a term for this kind of mismatch?

Answer 1

put the names in backticks:

`ignore`, `exists`

If you’re working across multiple tables or databases you need to escape the database name, table name, and field name separately (if each matches a keyword):

SELECT * FROM `db1`.`table1`
LEFT JOIN `db2`.`table2` on `db1`.`table1`.`field1`=`db2`.`table2`.`field2`

Only the portions that actually match a keyword have to be escaped, so things like:

select * from `db1`.table

are ok too.