Benefits of using backtick (`) in MySQL queries?

They are called quoted identifiers and they tell the parser to handle the text between them as a literal string. They are useful for when you have a column or table that contains a keyword or space. For instance the following would not work:

CREATE TABLE my table (id INT);

But the following would:

CREATE TABLE `my table` (id INT);

Also, the following would get an error, because COUNT is a reserved keyword:

SELECT count FROM some_table

But the following would be parsed correctly:

SELECT `count` FROM some_table

I hope this helps you.

If you want to use something around object identifiers, use at least the standard double quotes: "

This works in MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, etc. etc. For MySQL you might need the SQL mode ansi_quotes, depending on the default configuration:

SET sql_mode = 'ANSI_QUOTES';

Backticks ` are only used in MySQL, you learn a type of SQL that won't work in any other brand of DBMS.

It means you can have spaces in table names. Not particular appealing, of course. Same with SQL Server's [].