How To Rename an Existing Column in a Table? - MySQL FAQs - Understanding SQL CREATE, ALTER and DROP Statements

If you have an existing column in a table and you want to change the column name, you can use the "ALTER TABLE ... CHANGE" statement. This statement allows you to change the name of a column, and its definition. The tutorial script below gives you a good example:

mysql> ALTER TABLE tip CHANGE COLUMN subject 
   title VARCHAR(60);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.51 sec)
Records: 1  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> SHOW COLUMNS FROM tip;
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------
| Field       | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra 
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------
| id          | int(11)      | NO   | PRI |         |       
| title       | varchar(60)  | YES  |     | NULL    |       
| description | varchar(256) | NO   |     |         |       
| author      | varchar(40)  | YES  |     | NULL    |       
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------
4 rows in set (0.02 sec)