MySql - alias for index name ( PRIMARY )

Question

Is there a way to setup an alias for indexes/primary keys? In other words, MySql has my primary key named "PRIMARY", and I want to name it something else, also, to make it compatible with my software. I know primary keys have to be named "PRIMARY" ( see here and here for the discussion ). So I figured, if there was a way to make an alias to the primary key, that would solve my problem.

NOTE: I am not talking about the column name, but the actual name of the index, as would appear in the "Key_name" column when you run the command "show indexes from " command.

2/29/2015 Edit in response to RandomSeed comment: The PRIMARY KEY column is, say, ithkey. In SQLServer, the index name is "ITHKEY", so our code was using "ITHKEY" as the index hint. But, of course, that won't work with my current MySql setup because the index/primary key for ithkey is named "PRIMARY", not "ITHKEY". I could, I suppose, change my code to reference "PRIMARY" in the index hints, was just trying to avoid that.

Answer 1

From a functional perspective (as far as MySQL is concerned), the PRIMARY key is just a UNIQUE NOT NULL constraint^*.

Therefore you could replace the PRIMAY KEY with a UNIQUE NOT NULL index that you can name as you see fit.

If the PRIMARY KEY is also required by your application (or if the idea of a table without a primary key makes you sick), you can keep both keys on the table, which doubles the corresponding overhead, both in terms of CPU time and storage space (so this is a bad idea).

There is no such thing as an index alias with MySQL.

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^*If you do not define a PRIMARY KEY for your table, MySQL locates the first UNIQUE index where all the key columns are NOT NULL and InnoDB uses it as the clustered index (reference).