Run raw SQL in migration

Solution 1:

The issue (as @postashin said) was the backticks.

As of Laravel 5 (not sure about Laravel 4), you could have done this:

DB::statement('ALTER TABLE `users` MODIFY `age` DATETIME');

In fact you didn't even need the back ticks as they don't need escaping. So you could have just written:

DB::statement('ALTER TABLE users MODIFY age DATETIME');

You do not need this in the closure either if you are just executing a database statement.

However a better approach to what you are doing is as follows:

Schema::table('users', function(Blueprint $table) {
    $table->dateTime('age')->change();
});

Note the last solution can sometimes raise an error due to a bug in Doctrine, which usually occurs if you have an enum in the table (not just the column you are changing).

For more information, see Laravel Database Migration - Modifying Column

Solution 2:

Use back-ticks instead of single quotes to escape identifiers in MySQL:

alter table `users` modify `age` datetime

In this particular case you can omit escaping at all:

alter table users modify age datetime