How to Use Reserved Words as Column Names in SQL?

In SQL, certain words are reserved. These are called Keywords or Reserved Words. These words cannot be used as identifiers i.e. as column names in SQL. But, there is an exception to this rule too. In this article, we will discuss how to use Reserved Words as column names in SQL. For this article, we will be using the Microsoft SQL Server as our database.

Step 1: Create a Database. For this use the below command to create a database named w3wiki

Query:

CREATE DATABASE w3wiki

Output:

Step 2: Use the w3wiki database. For this use the below command

Query:

USE w3wiki

Output:

Step 3: Create a table inside the database w3wiki. We will name the table BIKE. It will contain 2 columns named SELECT and TABLE. Both these are keywords in SQL. The trick here is to type the column names inside the square brackets ‘[]’ so that they are not read as a Reserved Word by the compiler.

Query:

CREATE TABLE BIKE(
[SELECT] VARCHAR(10),
[TABLE] INT);

Output:

Note: Here, the SELECT column stores the names of the bikes, and the TABLE column stores the cost of the bikes.

Step 4: Add data to the BIKE table.

Query:

INSERT INTO BIKE VALUES('HERO',10000);
INSERT INTO BIKE VALUES('TVS',20000);
INSERT INTO BIKE VALUES('YAMAHA',30000);
INSERT INTO BIKE VALUES('HONDA',40000);
INSERT INTO BIKE VALUES('BAJAJ',50000);

Output:

Step 4: Display the SELECT column from the BIKE table.

Query:

SELECT [SELECT] FROM BIKE;

Output:

Step 5: Display the TABLE column from the BIKE table.

Query:

SELECT [TABLE] FROM BIKE;

Output:

Step 5: We can even display both the columns using the comma separator.

Query:

SELECT [SELECT],[TABLE] FROM BIKE;

Output:

Hence, in a similar fashion, we can use any of the reserved names in SQL as a column name.