Can't believe I didn't see this earlier; the issue I had with MySQL was that the database had the column name 'desc' which I originally had the idea that it meant 'description' but in fact it was conflicting with the keyword 'descending'. This gave the syntax error.
Here is what I found on the MySQL documentation; 9.3 Keywords and Reserved Words
:
Keywords are words that have significance in SQL. Certain keywords, such as SELECT, DELETE, or BIGINT, are reserved and require special treatment for use as identifiers such as table and column names. This may also be true for the names of built-in functions.
On that web link above you can see a list of keywords/reserved words that shouldn't be used or should include back slashes (which I won't go into).
My solution? Don't use reserved words as identifiers!
The easiest solution that you can do is to simply avoid using these words. I prevented using the reserved word 'desc' by changing the identifier to 'description'.
Thanks for all your help! Hope this assists people in the future.
