TABLE CREATION

Create a MySQL Table Using MySQLi and PDO

The CREATE TABLE statement is used to create a table in MySQL.

We will create a table named "MyGuests", with five columns: "id", "firstname", "lastname", "email" and "reg_date":

CREATE TABLE MyGuests (
id INT(6) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
firstname VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
lastname VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
email VARCHAR(50),
reg_date TIMESTAMP
)

Notes on the table above:

The data type specifies what type of data the column can hold. For a complete reference of all the available data types, go to our Data Types reference.

After the data type, you can specify other optional attributes for each column:

• NOT NULL - Each row must contain a value for that column, null values are not allowed
• DEFAULT value - Set a default value that is added when no other value is passed
• UNSIGNED - Used for number types, limits the stored data to positive numbers and zero
• AUTO INCREMENT - MySQL automatically increases the value of the field by 1 each time a new record is added
• PRIMARY KEY - Used to uniquely identify the rows in a table. The column with PRIMARY KEY setting is often an ID number, and is often used with AUTO_INCREMENT

Each table should have a primary key column (in this case: the "id" column). Its value must be unique for each record in the table.

The following examples shows how to create the table in PHP:

Example (MySQLi Object-oriented)

<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "myDB";

// Create connection$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
// Check connectionif ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
} 

// sql to create table$sql = "CREATE TABLE MyGuests (
id INT(6) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, 
firstname VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
lastname VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
email VARCHAR(50),
reg_date TIMESTAMP
)";

if ($conn->query($sql) === TRUE) {
    echo "Table MyGuests created successfully";
} else {
    echo "Error creating table: " . $conn->error;
}

$conn->close();
?>