MySQL Bugs: #58006: Support for ALTER TABLE RENAME COLUMN

Bug #58006	Support for ALTER TABLE RENAME COLUMN
Submitted:	5 Nov 2010 8:22	Modified:	24 Aug 2017 23:54
Reporter:	Adrien de Croy	Email Updates:
Status:	Closed	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: DDL	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	any	OS:	Any
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any
Tags:	ALTER TABLE RENAME COLUMN

Description:
Currently the only way to rename a column is to use the CHANGE clause.

This is a very poor design.

This has the unfortunate requirement of requiring re-specification of all the attributes of the column.  These may not be available to the code trying to do the rename (e.g. DB migration C++ code).

If you just want to simply rename it, you are treading on a minefield.  Chances are you'll alter some other attribute of the column, and/or lose data.

Also to make it worse, since it's possible to alter data type (inadvertently) each row in the column needs to be checked for truncation etc.  This makes a column rename ridiculously slow for what is really required.

So, the current method of renaming columns is simply a very poor design, and this is why other DBs have the RENAME COLUMN option.

How to repeat:
I can't believe this field is mandatory  web devs setting policy yet again.

THIS IS A FEATURE REQUEST.

Suggested fix:
Please consider adding the syntax.  It should be really easy.

For examples look at the PostgreSQL or Oracle documentation.

Thank you for the feature request.

Duplicate of bug #26949.

Posted by developer:
 
Implemented via worklog WL#10761

Posted by developer:
 
Fixed in 8.0.3.

ALTER TABLE now supports easier column renaming using RENAME COLUMN
old_name TO new_name syntax. RENAME COLUMN is more convenient than
CHANGE, which requires respecifying the current column definition.