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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T13:23:27+00:00

I am somewhat new to MySQL (come from MS SQL) and have recently come

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I am somewhat new to MySQL (come from MS SQL) and have recently come across something very confusing to me when trying to INSERT values into the database.

I created an INSERT SQL command via PHP yet found it threw an error when trying to execute.

INSERT INTO myTableName (first-name, last-name) VALUES ('Ted', 'Johnson')

To my way of thinking the above string should have worked .. but it didn’t. I even tried using it directly in phpMyAdmin but I got the same syntax error.

The only thing that ended up making it work is if I surrounded the field names in the SQL statement by the “backtick” or “accent” character (the other character on the tilde key on the keyboard). For example …

INSERT INTO myTableName(`first-name`, `last-name`) VALUES ('Ted', 'Johnson')

I have never known this to be necessary in MySQL or MS SQL Server. I have always just listed the field names without delimiting them. Has anyone run across this before? I am using MySQL 5.0.77. Thank you.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your column names contain hyphens, which is generally not a good idea, since the parser could misinterpret as first minus name. The back-ticks are the MySQL method of quoting column names to ensure they’re treated correctly.

    If your columns were first_name and last_name, the back-ticks would not be necessary.

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