PHP Create MySQL Tables

A database table has its own unique name and consists of columns and rows.

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”:

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 Procedural)

Example (PDO)

setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);

    // 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
    )";

    // use exec() because no results are returned
    $conn->exec($sql);
    echo "Table MyGuests created successfully";
    }
catch(PDOException $e)
    {
    echo $sql . "
" . $e->getMessage();
    }

$conn = null;
?>