Which of the following operations is explicitly listed as being supported by ALTER TABLE?

Which of the following operations is explicitly listed as being supported by ALTER TABLE?

• A. Create a stored procedure
• B. Rename a column
• C. Drop a trigger
• D. Add an index

Answer: (B)

ALTER TABLE is the statement used to change the structure of an existing table. It explicitly supports schema changes such as renaming a column, which is done with a command like ALTER TABLE table_name RENAME COLUMN old_name TO new_name. This directly changes the column’s identifier without touching the data. The other options involve objects or operations not typically performed with ALTER TABLE: creating a stored procedure is defining a separate programmable object, dropping a trigger is removing a separate database object, and adding an index is usually handled by a dedicated index-creation action (though some systems offer an ALTER TABLE variant for indexing, the canonical and explicit ALTER TABLE capability here is renaming a column).

ALTER TABLE is the statement used to change the structure of an existing table. It explicitly supports schema changes such as renaming a column, which is done with a command like ALTER TABLE table_name RENAME COLUMN old_name TO new_name. This directly changes the column’s identifier without touching the data.

The other options involve objects or operations not typically performed with ALTER TABLE: creating a stored procedure is defining a separate programmable object, dropping a trigger is removing a separate database object, and adding an index is usually handled by a dedicated index-creation action (though some systems offer an ALTER TABLE variant for indexing, the canonical and explicit ALTER TABLE capability here is renaming a column).