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18.4.4 Populating Spatial Columns »
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18.4.3. Creating Spatial Columns

MySQL provides a standard way of creating spatial columns for geometry types, for example, with CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE. Currently, spatial columns are supported for MyISAM, InnoDB, NDB, BDB, and ARCHIVE tables. (Support for storage engines other than MyISAM was added in MySQL 5.0.16.) See also the annotations about spatial indexes under Section 18.6.1, “Creating Spatial Indexes”.

  • Use the CREATE TABLE statement to create a table with a spatial column: 

    CREATE TABLE geom (g GEOMETRY);

  • Use the ALTER TABLE statement to add or drop a spatial column to or from an existing table: 

    ALTER TABLE geom ADD pt POINT;
ALTER TABLE geom DROP pt;