Question

I have a short question about mysql query.

What is correct?

SELECT * FROM Persons WHERE Year='1965'

Or

SELECT * FROM `Persons` WHERE `Year` = '1965'

Is this a personal choice or is this something what is really wrong?

Answer 1

What if you have a table named table, or a column named where. These are reserved keywords. If you used those in your queries without backticks, they’d produce an invalid query (Of course, using reserved keywords is bad practice).

SELECT something FROM table WHERE where = 1;

vs.

SELECT something FROM `table` WHERE `where` = 1;