How to add a primary key to a MySQL table?

Question

This is what I tried but it fails:

alter table goods add column `id` int(10) unsigned primary AUTO_INCREMENT;

Does anyone have a tip?

Answer 1

Existing Column

If you want to add a primary key constraint to an existing column all of the previously listed syntax will fail.

To add a primary key constraint to an existing column use the form:

ALTER TABLE `goods`
MODIFY COLUMN `id` INT(10) UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT;

Answer 2

This code work in my mysql db:

ALTER TABLE `goods`
ADD COLUMN `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`);

Answer 3

Not sure if this matter to anyone else, but I prefer the id table to the first column in the database. The syntax for that is:

ALTER TABLE your_db.your_table ADD COLUMN `id` int(10) UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT FIRST;

Which is just a slight improvement over the first answer. If you wanted it to be in a different position, then

ALTER TABLE unique_address ADD COLUMN `id` int(10) UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT AFTER some_other_column;

HTH, -ft

Answer 4

For me, none of suggestions worked giving me the errors of syntax, so I just gave a try using phpmyadmin(version 4.9.2), (10.4.10-MariaDB) and added id column with auto-increment primary key. Id column was nicely added from the first element.

Query output was:

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT FIRST, ADD PRIMARY KEY (id);