rocknbil - 5:14 am on Sep 10, 2010 (gmt 0)

It is a mysql thing. The backticks are not usually necessary, but avoids any issues you have with naming a field that is a reserved word. Example, if you manage to name a column "date" or "curdate", those are a data types and an internal mysql function, respectively.

insert into table (`date`,`curdate`) values ('2010-01-01',curdate());