"Incorrect syntax near 'UNSIGNED'" when I run the following query, I get the error "Incorrect syntax near 'UNSIGNED'". Can you please help me figure out what's going on? Thanks!

create table  employees (
    id TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT primary key ,
    firstname varchar(25) not null,
    lastname varchar(25), not null,
    email varchar(45) not null,
    phone varchar(10) not null);
The error message suggests to me you are actually running your DDL statement against a SQL Server instance rather than a MySQL one.

If your server is SQL Server and you mistakenly thought it was MySQL and wrote your DDL using the MySQL syntax, you need to fix not just the UNSIGNED part but also AUTO_INCREMENT. In SQL Server's flavour of SQL, called Transact-SQL, that line would look like this:

id tinyint NOT NULL IDENTITY primary key,


You might also want to switch to smallint, because, as SQL Server does not support unsigned types, you will have only 127 positive values using the tinyint type. Additionally, if you want to ensure the values cannot be negative or nil, you can add a check constraint:

id smallint NOT NULL IDENTITY primary key check (id &gt; 0),


just to make sure that incorrect values cannot be inserted explicitly (when temporarily switched to the SET IDENTITY_INSERT ... ON mode).

If you did mean to run the statement in MySQL, then just check your connection settings.