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I’m just playing around with SQL for the first time at the moment and I’ve been trying to add new columns to an existing table for a student registry sort of deal.

I’ve followed a few tutorials online and they’re all pointing to what I’ve been trying so far which is basically this:

ALTER TABLE students 
ADD 
allergies VARCHAR(255), 
afterSchoolActivities VARCHAR(255);

Based on the stuff I’ve read and the tutorials I’ve watched, it should work, but phpmyadmin displays an error message:

1 errors were found during analysis.

Unrecognized alter operation. (near “” at position 0)

1064 – You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MariaDB server version for the right syntax to use near ‘VARCHAR(255)’ at line 1

I’m pretty sure there’s something here tha I’m missing, but I’ve been staring at this for a while and cannot seem to figure it out. Thought I’d reach out to this amazing community for help.

P.S: Apologies for the poor code formatting, I’ve been trying to post this question for nearly an hour indenting and trying everything else, but it just doesn’t seem to work. EDIT: Somehow managed to fix it after posting.

2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER

    Right, so after going back and forth for a while, I realized that what was happening was that I wasn't specifying what should happen after the comma. I assumed it was implied after the first ADD, but apparently it is not.

    For anyone else who happens to get stuck like I did, what seemed to have fixed the issue was this:

    ALTER TABLE students 
    ADD allergies VARCHAR(255),
    ADD afterSchoolActivities VARCHAR(255);
    

  2. I’m trying to add both “allergies” and “afterSchoolActivities”

    In that case, you can use 2 statements.

    ALTER TABLE students
    ADD COLUMN allergies VARCHAR(255);
    
    ALTER TABLE students
    ADD COLUMN afterSchoolActivites VARCHAR(255);
    
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