How can I manipulate a table with a reserved word as a column name?

I recently ran into this with a table that had a "CONDITION" field. 'Condition' is a reserved word in Mysql 5.0. After trying several commands to rename the field, I came upon this trick.

The Trick: Remember you can refer to any field using the TABLE.COLUMN syntax. Even though it seems silly, you can do something like this:

This causes an error:


mysql> alter table machinery drop column condition; ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'condition' at line 1 

This works:

mysql> alter table machinery drop column machinery.condition;