Rating:  - Might not be for you
I've found that just about any book on Stored Procedures will work fine for MySQL 5 programmers... so don't feel tied to books with MySQL in the name to learn about the topic. I've seen other books and websites which were easier for me to understand. Not sure if it was a reading/writing style conflict or what... but I ended up not keeping this one.
Rating:  - VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
Are you a MySQL programmer? If you are, then this book is for you. Authors Guy Harrison and Steven Feuerstein, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that will help MySQL practitioners realize the full potential of MySQL stored programs.
Harrison and Feuerstein, begin by introducing the MySQL stored program language and provide a detailed description of the language structure and usage. Then, the authors describe how you can use the MySQL elements to build functional and useful store programs. The authors then show you how to use the stored programs within applications.
Finally, they show you how to get programs to work correctly by making them perform efficiently, robust and secure, and be easily maintained.
This most excellent book describes the stored program language introduced in MySQL 5.0. More importantly, this book will help you get the job done!!
Rating: - Absolute Necessity For MySQL Developers
'MySQL Stored Procedure Programming' by Guy Harrison is a wonderful book for any MySQL developers out there in the world. With the release my MySQL 5.0, stored procedures/functions and triggers were finally added, making MySQL a real-world database that could successfully compete with SQL Server and Oracle. While nowhere near as bloated as those 2 behemoths, MySQL has a rich, loyal following that loves this 'little database that could', but until the latest version, what it could do was good, but not good enough for many people.
Having MySQL 5 and the ability to now write stored procedures, this DB could be used to power even the most important of web applications. Having this book in your hands now gives you the power to learn how to perform this very task efficiently and effectively.
I love the writing, size, and great layout of this text. In true O'Reilly fashion it's packaged for the masses and it is a pleasure to learn from.
Chapter Overview:
01. Into to MySQL Stored Programs
02. MySQL Stored Programming 101
03. Language Fundamentals
04. Blocks, Conditional Statements, Iterative Programming
05. Using SQL in Stored Programming
06. Error Handling
07. Creating and Maintaining Stored Programs
08. Transactions
09. MySQL built-in functions
10. Stored Functions
11. Triggers
12. Using Stored Programs in applications
13. MySQL with PHP
14. MySQL with Java
15. MySQL with Perl
16. MySQL with Python
17. MySQL with .NET
18. Stored Program Security
19. Tuning Stored Programs
20. Basic SQL Tuning
21. Advanced SQL Tuning
22. Optimizing Stored Program Code
23. Best Practices in MySQL Stored Program Development
Everything about this book just screams YES YES YES!!! One of my favorites that I have had the pleasure to review and unless you are the most awesome of SQL developers, I have no doubts that you will love this book too!!
***** HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Rating:  - an excellent book
Having worked in java and oracle with pl/sql some time ago, I'm in the "probably better not to use stored procedures" camp for most environments - but now that mysql offers them, I figured it was best to see how they tackled the problem and this o'reilly book looked good by authors with good credentials. And, fortunately, O'Reilly didn't let me down - they've had really strong offerings recently after a bit of a bad spell and this book was no exception.
This book is well written and well organized - something too few books are these days! It focuses on incremental teaching, but sidesteps the pitfalls that many such books do by pointing out when certatin features are glossed over at this point to be further explained in a future chapter. This is the perfect way to handle that problem, but one so few books take the time to do, leaving you puzzling over whether or not you need to fully understand particular examples.
It's divided into 4 sections. For me, the heart of the book was in the first 2. The first "Stored Programming Fundamentals" gives you the nuts and bolts of the language - loops, blocks, variables, error handling, etc.. Very well written, very well organized and easy to follow.
The second part "Stored Program Construction" goes into more detail with working examples of stored procedures and functions. More language details are brought to light, it demonstrates how to use transactions in this context and triggers are introduced and explained. These two sections were great, to the point and easy to follow. The only minor qualm I had was their only incidental discussion of scoping - they'd address it with a sentence here and a note there, leaving you to glean how things worked. It's not complex, but a short paragraph dedicated to scope would have really been nice.
The third part, I think, was unnecessarily long. "Using MySQL Stored Programs in Applications" - this covered how to work in php, java, perl, python and .net. Which was great, but they put in about 150 pages, almost a quarter of the book to this task and almost all of it was dedicated to the basics of how to use databases in these languages. Very basic querying, etc. It wasn't in the scope of the book and shouldn't have been - the whole thing should have been a single chapter that just discussed how to work with stored programs in each of the languages.
The last section, "optimizing stored programs" was very good. It suffered a little bit from covering topics that shouldn't have been in the book - but they cover it very well. SQL Tuning is given a lot of pages, but they very succinctly cover many bases in a very easy to grasp manner. They discuss how to use stored programs to increase security, and they dedicate a chapter to the actual mechanics of optimizing your stored program code (aside from optimizing the sql that it might include). They conclude on an excellent Best Practices chapter that gives you the authors' insights on everything from development to style to sql practices. I really enjoy it when books include these, as it gives a lot of insight into how the authors think about programming and you can see where your thoughts coincided with and contradict - and hopefully (as was the case with this book) get you thinking a little bit more about things you might not be actively thinking about.
Overall this book is a great book. It's biggest failing, if you can call it that, was including too much. I would have liked a book maybe 2/3 the size and more tightly focussed. There are many books on sql optimization and hordes of books and online resources dedicated to using mysql with various programming languages. An excellent book that gives a pretty balanced view of the pros and cons of stored programming (although they do show a slight bias towards the use of - but what can you expect? :).
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