Cast the first stone he who never made a mistake modeling a database! Every now and then in your career you will be face to face with a problem like this: due to the nature of a table’s data you created a table without a primary key, or using a composed key. So far so good, but due to an upgrade you see the need to have a unique key identifying all the registers in your table, in my case it was due to a AJAX interface.
So what now? You have a table full of data, and of course, as Murphy’s law will tell you, that data cannot be erased. MySQL will prevent you from turning a filled to a primary key if it finds duplicated values in the table. Quite a brain twister, but I did a little research and found a rather simple solution to the matter.
UPDATE: So it actually came to my atention that a query I had already tried does the job in an even simpler form, but my modelling tool executed the commands out of sync and that why i had problems. So this article stays on as a good example of how to use mysql variables.
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