Question

I am working from this database, its one of the first I have tried building:

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/38ef8

When I try to add this line:

Insert Into country (name) values ('US');

It says Field ‘id’ doesn’t have a default value. Am I doing my primary key correctly? I have seen people using “auto_incrment” on their primary key like this example:

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/c807a/2

Is that what I should be using?

Answer 1

If you didn’t specify PRIMARY KEY column as AUTO_INCREMENT then you have to give values manually, for example:

INSERT INTO Country(id, name) values(1, 'US');

It’s up to you wheter use AUTO_INCREMENT or not. There are many reasons to do it and many not to do it:

• Pros and Cons of autoincrement keys on "every table"
• Should each and every table have a primary key?