Stored Procedures

Summary

Stored procedures in MySQL are a welcome and exciting addition to the 5.0 release. While there’s a lot of power, and perhaps some efficiency, in moving logic into your database, it’s important to consider if and how procedures fit into your existing application. Hasty decisions based on excitement to use cool technology usually lead to problems down the road.

As mentioned in the chapter, users should exercise caution in adopting the stored procedure functionality until the stability of the 5.0 server matches their environment requirements. For most users, waiting for the stable release is probably the best choice.

MySQL’s choice of SQL:2003 provides a good set of statements for developing procedures and a standard for potential inter-database procedure exchange. MySQL provides a good set of tools for creating, altering, dropping, and viewing procedures.

As MySQL developers continue to develop and flush out their implementation of stored procedures, we look forward to further developments of the stored procedure functionality and anxiously await the stable release of the 5.0 branch of MySQL.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at stored functions, another technology available in MySQL versions 5.0 and later.