MySQL 5 introduced a plethora of new
features - stored procedures being one of the most significant. In this
tutorial, we will focus on what they are, and how they can make your
life easier.
The “academic” position on this is quite clear and supports the extensive use of stored procedures. On the other hand, when you consider the opinions of those who work with them day in, day out, you'll notice that reactions vary from complete, unwavering support to utter hate. Keep these in mind.
The first part of the statement creates the procedure. The next
clauses defines the optional characteristics of the procedure. Then you
have the name and finally the body or routine code.
Stored procedure names are case insensitive, and you cannot create procedures with the same name. Inside a procedure body, you can't put database-manipulation statements.
The four characteristics of a procedure are:
This is a simple command. The
Declare a variable using the following syntax:
Let's declare a few variables:
With the
The
or:
There are technically three standard loops:
In this example, we'll perform some simple operations using a cursor:
Cursor has three important properties that you need to be familiar with in order to avoid unexpected results:
You have to evaluate the advantages that stored procedures can potentially bring to your applications, and then make a reasonable implementation that fits your requirements. I generally use procedures; their benefits in terms of security, code maintenance and software design make them worthy of use, in my opinion. Additionally, remember that procedures in MySQL are still a work in progress. You should fully expect improvements, in terms of functionality and performance in the future. Please don't hesitate to comment and share your ideas and opinions.
Introduction
“ A stored routine is a set of SQL statements that can be stored in the server.”A stored procedure is a method to encapsulate repetitive tasks. They allow for variable declarations, flow control and other useful programming techniques.
The “academic” position on this is quite clear and supports the extensive use of stored procedures. On the other hand, when you consider the opinions of those who work with them day in, day out, you'll notice that reactions vary from complete, unwavering support to utter hate. Keep these in mind.
Pros
- Share logic with other applications. Stored procedures encapsulate functionality; this ensures that data access and manipulation are coherent between different applications.
- Isolate users from data tables. This gives you the ability to grant access to the stored procedures that manipulate the data but not directly to the tables.
- Provide a security mechanism. Considering the prior
item, if you can only access the data using the stored procedures
defined, no one else can execute a
DELETE
SQL statement and erase your data. - To improve performance because it reduces network traffic. With a stored procedure, multiple calls can be melded into one.
Cons
- Increased load on the database server -- most of the work is done on the server side, and less on the client side.
- There's a decent learning curve. You'll need to learn the syntax of MySQL statements in order to write stored procedures.
- You are repeating the logic of your application in two different places: your server code and the stored procedures code, making things a bit more difficult to maintain.
- Migrating to a different database management system (DB2, SQL Server, etc) may potentially be more difficult.
Additionally, I'll be using very rudimentary table structures, strictly to ease the explanation. I'm showing off stored procedures, and they're complex enough without worrying about big tables.
Step 1 - Picking a Delimiter
The delimiter is the character or string of characters that you'll use to tell the mySQL client that you've finished typing in an SQL statement. For ages, the delimiter has always been a semicolon. That, however, causes problems, because, in a stored procedure, one can have many statements, and each must end with a semicolon. In this tutorial I will use “//”Step 2 - How to Work with a Stored Procedure
Creating a Stored Procedure
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `p2` () LANGUAGE SQL DETERMINISTIC SQL SECURITY DEFINER COMMENT 'A procedure' BEGIN SELECT 'Hello World !' ; END // |
Stored procedure names are case insensitive, and you cannot create procedures with the same name. Inside a procedure body, you can't put database-manipulation statements.
The four characteristics of a procedure are:
- Language : For portability purposes; the default value is SQL.
- Deterministic : If the procedure always returns
the same results, given the same input. This is for replication and
logging purposes. The default value is
NOT DETERMINISTIC
. -
SQL Security : At call time, check privileges of the user.
INVOKER
is the user who calls the procedure.DEFINER
is the creator of the procedure. The default value isDEFINER
. -
Comment : For documentation purposes; the default value is
""
Calling a Stored Procedure
To call a procedure, you only need to enter the wordCALL
,
followed by the name of the procedure, and then the parentheses,
including all the parameters between them (variables or values).
Parentheses are compulsory.
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| CALL stored_procedure_name (param1, param2, ....) CALL procedure1(10 , 'string parameter' , @parameter_var); |
Modify a Stored Procedure
MySQL provides anALTER PROCEDURE
statement to modify a
routine, but only allows for the ability to change certain
characteristics. If you need to alter the body or the parameters, you
must drop and recreate the procedure.Delete a Stored Procedure
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| DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS p2; |
IF EXISTS
clause prevents an error in case the procedure does not exist. Step 3 - Parameters
Let's examine how you can define parameters within a stored procedure.-
CREATE PROCEDURE proc1 ()
: Parameter list is empty -
CREATE PROCEDURE proc1 (IN varname DATA-TYPE)
: One input parameter. The wordIN
is optional because parameters areIN
(input) by default. -
CREATE PROCEDURE proc1 (OUT varname DATA-TYPE)
: One output parameter. -
CREATE PROCEDURE proc1 (INOUT varname DATA-TYPE)
: One parameter which is both input and output.
IN example
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_IN` ( IN var1 INT ) BEGIN SELECT var1 + 2 AS result; END // |
OUT example
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_OUT` ( OUT var1 VARCHAR (100)) BEGIN SET var1 = 'This is a test' ; END // |
INOUT example
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_INOUT` ( OUT var1 INT ) BEGIN SET var1 = var1 * 2; END // |
Step 4 - Variables
The following step will teach you how to define variables, and store values inside a procedure. You must declare them explicitly at the start of theBEGIN/END
block, along with their data types.
Once you've declared a variable, you can use it anywhere that you
could use a session variable, or literal, or column name.Declare a variable using the following syntax:
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| DECLARE varname DATA-TYPE DEFAULT defaultvalue; |
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| DECLARE a, b INT DEFAULT 5; DECLARE str VARCHAR (50); DECLARE today TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_DATE ; DECLARE v1, v2, v3 TINYINT; |
Working with variables
Once the variables have been declared, you can assign them values using theSET
or SELECT
command:
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `var_proc` ( IN paramstr VARCHAR (20)) BEGIN DECLARE a, b INT DEFAULT 5; DECLARE str VARCHAR (50); DECLARE today TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_DATE ; DECLARE v1, v2, v3 TINYINT; INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (a); SET str = 'I am a string' ; SELECT CONCAT(str,paramstr), today FROM table2 WHERE b >=5; END // |
Step 5 - Flow Control Structures
MySQL supports the IF, CASE, ITERATE, LEAVE LOOP, WHILE
and REPEAT
constructs for flow control within stored programs. We're going to review how to use IF
, CASE
and WHILE
specifically, since they happen to be the most commonly used statements in routines.
IF
statement
With the IF
statement, we can handle tasks which involves conditions:
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_IF` ( IN param1 INT ) BEGIN DECLARE variable1 INT ; SET variable1 = param1 + 1; IF variable1 = 0 THEN SELECT variable1; END IF; IF param1 = 0 THEN SELECT 'Parameter value = 0' ; ELSE SELECT 'Parameter value <> 0' ; END IF; END // |
CASE
statement
The CASE
statement is another way to check conditions and take the appropriate path. It's an excellent way to replace multiple IF
statements. The statement can be written in two different ways, providing great flexibility to handle multiple conditions.
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_CASE` ( IN param1 INT ) BEGIN DECLARE variable1 INT ; SET variable1 = param1 + 1; CASE variable1 WHEN 0 THEN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (param1); WHEN 1 THEN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (variable1); ELSE INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (99); END CASE ; END // |
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_CASE` ( IN param1 INT ) BEGIN DECLARE variable1 INT ; SET variable1 = param1 + 1; CASE WHEN variable1 = 0 THEN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (param1); WHEN variable1 = 1 THEN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (variable1); ELSE INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (99); END CASE ; END // |
WHILE
statement
There are technically three standard loops: WHILE
loops, LOOP
loops, and REPEAT
loops. You also have the option of creating a loop using the “Darth Vader” of programming techniques: the GOTO
statement. Check out this example of a loop in action:
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_WHILE` ( IN param1 INT ) BEGIN DECLARE variable1, variable2 INT ; SET variable1 = 0; WHILE variable1 < param1 DO INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (param1); SELECT COUNT (*) INTO variable2 FROM table1; SET variable1 = variable1 + 1; END WHILE; END // |
Step 6 - Cursors
Cursor
is used to iterate through a set of rows returned by a query and process each row.
MySQL supports cursor
in stored procedures. Here's a summary of the essential syntax to create and use a cursor.
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| DECLARE cursor-name CURSOR FOR SELECT ...; /*Declare and populate the cursor with a SELECT statement */ DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND /*Specify what to do when no more records found*/ OPEN cursor-name; /*Open cursor for use*/ FETCH cursor-name INTO variable [, variable]; /*Assign variables with the current column values*/ CLOSE cursor-name; /*Close cursor after use*/ |
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| DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE `proc_CURSOR` ( OUT param1 INT ) BEGIN DECLARE a, b, c INT ; DECLARE cur1 CURSOR FOR SELECT col1 FROM table1; DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND SET b = 1; OPEN cur1; SET b = 0; SET c = 0; WHILE b = 0 DO FETCH cur1 INTO a; IF b = 0 THEN SET c = c + a; END IF; END WHILE; CLOSE cur1; SET param1 = c; END // |
- Asensitive : Once open, the cursor will not reflect changes in its source tables. In fact, MySQL does not guarantee the cursor will be updated, so you can't rely on it.
- Read Only : Cursors are not updatable.
- Not Scrollable : Cursors can be traversed only in one direction, forward, and you can't skip records from fetching.
Conclusion
In this lesson, we covered the fundamentals of stored procedures and some specific properties pertaining to them. Of course, you should continue your studies in areas like security, SQL statements, and performance before you can master MySQL routines.You have to evaluate the advantages that stored procedures can potentially bring to your applications, and then make a reasonable implementation that fits your requirements. I generally use procedures; their benefits in terms of security, code maintenance and software design make them worthy of use, in my opinion. Additionally, remember that procedures in MySQL are still a work in progress. You should fully expect improvements, in terms of functionality and performance in the future. Please don't hesitate to comment and share your ideas and opinions.
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