I am looking for a way to edit the COMMENT metadata for a table or column after the table or column is already in existence. Anyone happen to know what the DDL for doing that would be? something like this perhaps (obviously these don't work, this is just to demonstrate what I would need):

ALTER TABLE ADD COMMENT 'this table is for blah'
ALTER TABLE MODIFY COLUMN ADD COMMENT 'this column is for blah'

this page says it's possible but then doesn't give an example, and it's not clear to me from the syntax of ALTER TABLE that it's even possible: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/alter-table.html

ALTER TABLE <table> COMMENT = 'blah blah blah';
ALTER TABLE <table> MODIFY COLUMN <column> <col params> COMMENT = 'blah blah blah';
e.g.

ALTER TABLE `sales` MODIFY COLUMN ID INT NOT NULL COMMENT = 'blah blah blah';

Thanks!

that's lame that you have to provide the entire column definition just to change the comment though - seems error prone.

I agree, however it's the only way I believe that it's possible.
How does MySQL know if the alter table statement you are doing is supposed to change the column definition or not?
ALTER TABLE <table> MODIFY COLUMN ID COMMENT='blah blah' is non-conformative, how would it differentiate between this
ALTER TABLE <table> MODIFY COLUMN ID NOT NULL
without a special case switch?
Do you actually want to change it to NOT NULL? Or was it supposed to be VARCHAR NOT NULL ? It doesn't know. Hence the requirement for full syntax. It's anal but enforces restriction...

what do you mean? are you referring to ANSI compliance?

seems to me in the context of a full blown SQL parser it would be a simple matter to distinguish COMMENT from other keywords. but the point is moot since it obviously doesn't work the way I would have designed it.

thanks again for the syntax.