escaping - How do I escape reserved words used as column names? MySQL/Create Table

Question

I am generating tables from classes in .NET and one problem is a class may have a field name key which is a reserved MySQL keyword. How do I escape it in a create table statement? (Note: The other problem below is text must be a fixed size to be indexed/unique)

create table if not exists misc_info (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL,
key TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL,
value TEXT NOT NULL)ENGINE=INNODB;

Answer 1

You can use double quotes if ANSI SQL mode is enabled

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS misc_info
  (
     id    INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL,
     "key" TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL,
     value TEXT NOT NULL
  )
ENGINE=INNODB; 

or the proprietary back tick escaping otherwise. (Where to find the ` character on various keyboard layouts is covered in this answer)

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS misc_info
  (
     id    INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL,
     `key` TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL,
     value TEXT NOT NULL
  )
ENGINE=INNODB; 

(Source: MySQL Reference Manual, 9.3 Reserved Words)