How do I add more members to my ENUM-type column in MySQL?

Question

The MySQL reference manual does not provide a clearcut example on how to do this.

I have an ENUM-type column of country names that I need to add more countries to. What is the correct MySQL syntax to achieve this?

Here's my attempt:

ALTER TABLE carmake CHANGE country country ENUM('Sweden','Malaysia');

The error I get is: ERROR 1265 (01000): Data truncated for column 'country' at row 1.

The country column is the ENUM-type column in the above-statement.

SHOW CREATE TABLE OUTPUT:

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE carmake;
+---------+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table   | Create Table
+---------+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| carmake | CREATE TABLE `carmake` (
`carmake_id` tinyint(4) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` tinytext,
`country` enum('Japan','USA','England','Australia','Germany','France','Italy','Spain','Czech Republic','China','South Korea','India') DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`carmake_id`),
KEY `name` (`name`(3))
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=49 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

SELECT DISTINCT country FROM carmake OUTPUT:

+----------------+
| country        |
+----------------+
| Italy          |
| Germany        |
| England        |
| USA            |
| France         |
| South Korea    |
| NULL           |
| Australia      |
| Spain          |
| Czech Republic |
+----------------+

Answer 1

Your code works for me. Here is my test case:

mysql> CREATE TABLE carmake (country ENUM('Canada', 'United States'));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE carmake;
+---------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table   | Create Table                                                                                                            |
+---------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| carmake | CREATE TABLE `carmake` (
  `country` enum('Canada','United States') default NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+---------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> ALTER TABLE carmake CHANGE country country ENUM('Sweden','Malaysia');
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.53 sec)
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE carmake;
+---------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table   | Create Table                                                                                                       |
+---------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| carmake | CREATE TABLE `carmake` (
  `country` enum('Sweden','Malaysia') default NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+---------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

What error are you seeing?

FWIW this would also work:

ALTER TABLE carmake MODIFY COLUMN country ENUM('Sweden','Malaysia');

I would actually recommend a country table rather than enum column. You may have hundreds of countries which would make for a rather large and awkward enum.

EDIT: Now that I can see your error message:

ERROR 1265 (01000): Data truncated for column 'country' at row 1.

I suspect you have some values in your country column that do not appear in your ENUM. What is the output of the following command?

SELECT DISTINCT country FROM carmake;

ANOTHER EDIT: What is the output of the following command?

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'sql_mode';

Is it STRICT_TRANS_TABLES or STRICT_ALL_TABLES? That could lead to an error (rather than the usual warning MySQL would give you in this situation.

YET ANOTHER EDIT: Ok, I now see that you definitely have values in the table that are not in the new ENUM. The new ENUM definition only allows 'Sweden' and 'Malaysia'. The table has 'USA', 'India' and several others.

LAST EDIT (MAYBE): I think you're trying to do this:

ALTER TABLE carmake CHANGE country country ENUM('Italy', 'Germany', 'England', 'USA', 'France', 'South Korea', 'Australia', 'Spain', 'Czech Republic', 'Sweden', 'Malaysia') DEFAULT NULL;

Answer 2

The discussion I had with Asaph may be unclear to follow as we went back and forth quite a bit.

I thought that I might clarify the upshot of our discourse for others who might face similar situations in the future to benefit from:

ENUM-type columns are very difficult beasts to manipulate. I wanted to add two countries (Malaysia & Sweden) to the existing set of countries in my ENUM.

It seems that MySQL 5.1 (which is what I am running) can only update the ENUM by redefining the existing set in addition to what I want:

This did not work:

ALTER TABLE carmake CHANGE country country ENUM('Sweden','Malaysia') DEFAULT NULL;

The reason was that the MySQL statement was replacing the existing ENUM with another containing the entries 'Malaysia' and 'Sweden' only. MySQL threw up an error because the carmake table already had values like 'England' and 'USA' which were not part of the new ENUM's definition.

Surprisingly, the following did not work either:

ALTER TABLE carmake CHANGE country country ENUM('Australia','England','USA'...'Sweden','Malaysia') DEFAULT NULL;

It turns out that even the order of elements of the existing ENUM needs to be preserved while adding new members to it. So if my existing ENUM looks something like ENUM('England','USA'), then my new ENUM has to be defined as ENUM('England','USA','Sweden','Malaysia') and not ENUM('USA','England','Sweden','Malaysia'). This problem only becomes manifest when there are records in the existing table that use 'USA' or 'England' values.

BOTTOM LINE:

Only use ENUMs when you do not expect your set of members to change once defined. Otherwise, lookup tables are much easier to update and modify.