I was hoping that someone who has more experience with MySQL would have given a proper answer for this question already. Maybe no one else had noticed the issue. The issue has now become manifest on the koha listserv discussion. I had not expected that this would really be a problem but it may well be a nuisance to change the code to ensure proper usage. Quoting is much preferable to changing well chosen column names. I hope the quoting people do is ANSI compliant. Koha 3.0 should be ensuring support for the use of other databases such as PostgreSQL and not accidentally introducing a dependency on any particular database software. A routine should check a database flavour parameter for flavour specific syntax but default to ANSI/ISO SQL-92 unless a later ANSI/ISO SQL standard must be required and cannot otherwise be implemented.

From the official reference. MySQL AB. Database, table, index, column, and alias names. In MySQL 5.0 reference manual. - 2005. - [Section] 9.2. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/legal-names.html .

"An identifier may be quoted or unquoted. If an identifier is a reserved word or contains special characters, you must quote it whenever you refer to it. For a list of reserved words, see Section 9.6, “Treatment of Reserved Words in MySQL”. Special characters are those outside the set of alphanumeric characters from the current character set, ‘_’, and ‘$’. The identifier quote character is the backtick (‘`’): mysql> SELECT * FROM `select` WHERE `select`.id > 100; If the server SQL mode includes the ANSI_QUOTES mode option, it is also allowable to quote identifiers with double quotes: mysql> CREATE TABLE "test" (col INT); ERROR 1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax. (...) mysql> SET sql_mode='ANSI_QUOTES'; mysql> CREATE TABLE "test" (col INT); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)" Thomas D Quoting Stephen Hedges <shedges@skemotah.com> :

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I've been trying to install Koha with MySQL 5.0, but I get an error when the installer tries to create the "issues" table. The problem turns out to be simple to explain, but harder to fix.

Starting with version 5.0, MySQL treats "return" as a reserved word, and the "issues" table has a column named "return." That's what causes the error. The easy and immediate fix is to avoid using MySQL 5.0 or higher. Eventually, however, it would be nice to change the name of this column so Koha users can use all the features of MySQL 5+.

-- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com

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