How can we amend the declared size of a column’s data type in MySQL?

It can be done with the help of ALTER TABLE command of MySQL. Consider the table ‘Student’ in which the size of ‘Grade’ column is declared as Varchar(10), can be seen from the following query −

mysql> DESCRIBE Student;
+--------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field  | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+--------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Name   | varchar(20) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| RollNo | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| Grade  | varchar(10) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+--------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
3 rows in set (0.06 sec)

Now suppose we want to increase its size from VARCHAR(10) to VARCHAR(50) then the following query will do it −

mysql> ALTER TABLE Student MODIFY column Grade Varchar(50);
Query OK, 3 rows affected (0.85 sec)
Records: 3 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> DESCRIBE Student;
+--------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field  | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+--------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Name   | varchar(20) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| RollNo | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| Grade  | varchar(50) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+--------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
3 rows in set (0.06 sec)

From the query above we can see that the size of column ‘Grade’ has been changed to VARCHAR(50).