Question

What I’m asking is whether when inserting a row in a MySQL database the columns that are null need to be included. For instance, when I use phpMyAdmin to insert a row, it will do something like this:

INSERT INTO table 
(
`col1`,
`col2`,
`col3`,
`col4`
)
VALUES
(
'value1',
NULL,
NULL,
'value2'
)

Assuming the fields are null by default, can I remove columns and NULL values from the insert statement?

Answer 1

by default, when you create column it is nullable (unless you have set NOT NULL on it). so when you want to insert record for specific columns only, you can omit that column and the values for it are automatically null.

INSERT INTO table (`col1`  ,`col4`)
           VALUES ('value1','value2')