Comments about oreilly MySQL Stored Procedure Programming:

I found the book to be well written and balanced. The authors did a fine job breaking out the book into four major parts:

1) Stored Programming Fundamentals, where Stored Programs equal Procedures, Functions and Triggers.

2) Stored Program Construction, including a discussion about transaction management and MySQL built-in functions

3) Using Stored Programs in Application, a major boon as most other books focus on raw DML

4) Optimizing Stored Programs, as most of your stored programs will execute DML.

If you are going to use stored programs in your application/environment, you should buy this book.

Comments about oreilly MySQL Stored Procedure Programming:

I have been working with MySQL for several years as a database back-end for Java, Ruby and C# programming projects. After upgrading to version 5, I have been meaning to look into MySQL's support for stored procedures.

The MySQL Stored Procedure Programming book was my first read on the subject and I found it quite useful. It covers not only stored procedures, but also functions and triggers, collectively called 'stored programs' in the book. While there are many books on MySQL, this book is dedicated to the stored programs domain and provides a lengthy treatment of the subject.

During the introduction, the authors provide a veritable laundry list of MySQL resources including many books and websites. The basic tools for creating stored programs in MySQL are visited and help set the groundwork for a 'read, type in the example and run it' feedback loop. Throughout the book, the examples are clear and easy to follow.

The introduction is followed by a brief tutorial, highlighting stored procedures, functions and triggers. What follows is two sections of chapters, over 200 pages in length, diving into the details of the stored procedure language fundamentals, blocks, conditional statements, iterative programming, error handling, the creation and maintenance of stored programs, transaction management, MySQL built-in functions, stored functions and triggers.

The next section of the book is of particular value to software developers that use MySQL in their applications. Over 150 pages showing you how to use MySQL stored programs from PHP, Java, Perl, Python and .NET. The Java section even shows the basics of using stored procedures with Hibernate and Spring.

After that, you'll be greeted with a 110 page medley of options to help you optimize your MySQL stored programs. The subject of tuning your SQL is addressed over the course of three chapters, from basic through advanced tuning topics. Additional optimization techniques such as reducing network traffic with stored programs, optimizing loops, recursion, cursors, trigger overhead and more are found in the final chapter of this section.

The book closes out with a chapter on best practices in MySQL stored program development. MySQL Stored Procedure Programming has earned a space on the MySQL shelf of my technical library. It's a fine book that will help you take your MySQL programming experience to another level.