a column called "desc"

[mayorquimby]

Hey -- I'm currently working my way through Mr. Yank's PHP/MySQL book and jumped in tonight.

I was in the process of creating my very first table and kept running into an error message. I wanted to call one of the columns "desc" as in short for description but I kept getting a syntax error. So I played with it and thought, OK, I'll rename it "tell." Well, sure enough "tell" worked while "desc" produced syntax errors. How come?

These were nothing but simple TEXT columns.

[garlinto]

Sounds like you need a good MySQL tutorial. "DESC" is a reserved keyword in SQL. It is an abbreviation for DESCENDING, which is used in ORDER BY statements.

MySQL Manual

Enjoy!

[guelphdad]

DESC is a reserved word for descending when you are ordering your columns highest to lowest value hence the error.

Dang, beat by seconds!

[bluesaga]

you need something like...

SELECT * FROM blah WHERE `desc` = 'Hello'

[guelphdad]

Yes bluesaga, you are right, you can use backquotes. Better practice though it to rename a column named with a reserved word. Sooner or later those backticks are going to be forgotten.