How to add, modify and drop column with default value, NOT NULL constraint – MySQL database Example

How to add column in existing table with default value is another popular SQL interview question asked for Junior level programming job interviews. Though syntax of SQL query to add column with default value varies little bit from database to database, it always been performed using ALTER keyword of ANSI SQL. Adding column in existing table in MySQL database is rather easy and straight forward and we will see example of SQL query for MySQL database which adds a column with default value. You can also provide constraints like NULL or NOT NULL while adding new column in table. In this SQL tutorial  we are adding third column in a table called Contacts which contains name and phone of contacts. Now we want to add another column email with default value "abc@yahoo.com". We will use ALTER command in SQL to do that. By the way this is next in our SQL tutorials e.g. How to join three tables in SQL and SQL query to find duplicate records in table. If you haven’t read them yet, then you may find them useful.

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