Sams Teach Yourself MySQL

Managing Tables

Now let’s look at how database tables are defined, altered, and dropped.

Creating a New Table

Use the CREATE TABLE command to create a new database table. A table definition consists of a number of columns and a set of table options. Each column in the table definition is given a data type and can also be given a constraint.

A column name can be up to 64 characters long and can contain any character. You must enclose the column name in quotes (“) or backticks (`) if it contains a space. A column name cannot be one of the keywords listed in Appendix F.

The data type of a column determines what values it can hold and the maximum size of a stored value. For instance, a column defined as VARCHAR(6) can contain text data up to 6 characters ...