MySQL 4.1 and up supports subqueries and derived tables. A “subquery” is a SELECT statement nested within another statement. A “derived table” (an unnamed view) is a subquery in the FROM clause of another statement. See Section 13.2.8, “Subquery Syntax”.

For MySQL versions older than 4.1, most subqueries can be rewritten using joins or other methods. See Section 13.2.8.11, “Rewriting Subqueries as Joins for Earlier MySQL Versions”, for examples that show how to do this.

MySQL Server doesn't support the SELECT ... INTO TABLE Sybase SQL extension. Instead, MySQL Server supports the INSERT INTO ... SELECT standard SQL syntax, which is basically the same thing. See Section 13.2.4.1, “INSERT ... SELECT Syntax”. For example:

INSERT INTO tbl_temp2 (fld_id)
    SELECT tbl_temp1.fld_order_id
    FROM tbl_temp1 WHERE tbl_temp1.fld_order_id > 100;

Alternatively, you can use SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE or CREATE TABLE ... SELECT.

As of MySQL 5.0, you can use SELECT ... INTO with user-defined variables. The same syntax can also be used inside stored routines using cursors and local variables. See Section 17.2.7.3, “SELECT ... INTO Statement”.

MySQL Server (version 3.23-max and all versions 4.0 and above) supports transactions with the InnoDB and BDB transactional storage engines. InnoDB provides full ACID compliance. See Chapter 14, Storage Engines and Table Types. For information about InnoDB differences from standard SQL with regard to treatment of transaction errors, see Section 14.2.15, “InnoDB Error Handling”.

The other non-transactional storage engines in MySQL Server (such as MyISAM) follow a different paradigm for data integrity called “atomic operations.” In transactional terms, MyISAM tables effectively always operate in AUTOCOMMIT=1 mode. Atomic operations often offer comparable integrity with higher performance.

Because MySQL Server supports both paradigms, you can decide whether your applications are best served by the speed of atomic operations or the use of transactional features. This choice can be made on a per-table basis.

As noted, the trade-off for transactional versus non-transactional storage engines lies mostly in performance. Transactional tables have significantly higher memory and disk space requirements, and more CPU overhead. On the other hand, transactional storage engines such as InnoDB also offer many significant features. MySQL Server's modular design allows the concurrent use of different storage engines to suit different requirements and deliver optimum performance in all situations.

But how do you use the features of MySQL Server to maintain rigorous integrity even with the non-transactional MyISAM tables, and how do these features compare with the transactional storage engines?

The transactional paradigm has its benefits and its drawbacks. Many users and application developers depend on the ease with which they can code around problems where an abort appears to be necessary, or is necessary. However, even if you are new to the atomic operations paradigm, or more familiar with transactions, do consider the speed benefit that non-transactional tables can offer on the order of three to five times the speed of the fastest and most optimally tuned transactional tables.

In situations where integrity is of highest importance, MySQL Server offers transaction-level reliability and integrity even for non-transactional tables. If you lock tables with LOCK TABLES, all updates stall until integrity checks are made. If you obtain a READ LOCAL lock (as opposed to a write lock) for a table that allows concurrent inserts at the end of the table, reads are allowed, as are inserts by other clients. The newly inserted records are not be seen by the client that has the read lock until it releases the lock. With INSERT DELAYED, you can write inserts that go into a local queue until the locks are released, without having the client wait for the insert to complete. See Section 7.3.3, “Concurrent Inserts”, and Section 13.2.4.2, “INSERT DELAYED Syntax”.

“Atomic,” in the sense that we mean it, is nothing magical. It only means that you can be sure that while each specific update is running, no other user can interfere with it, and there can never be an automatic rollback (which can happen with transactional tables if you are not very careful). MySQL Server also guarantees that there are no dirty reads.

Following are some techniques for working with non-transactional tables:

Stored procedures and functions are implemented beginning with MySQL 5.0. See Chapter 17, Stored Procedures and Functions.

Basic trigger functionality is implemented beginning with MySQL 5.0.2, with further development planned for MySQL 5.1. See Chapter 18, Triggers.

In MySQL Server 3.23.44 and up, the InnoDB storage engine supports checking of foreign key constraints, including CASCADE, ON DELETE, and ON UPDATE. See Section 14.2.6.4, “FOREIGN KEY Constraints”.

For storage engines other than InnoDB, MySQL Server parses the FOREIGN KEY syntax in CREATE TABLE statements, but does not use or store it. In the future, the implementation will be extended to store this information in the table specification file so that it may be retrieved by mysqldump and ODBC. At a later stage, foreign key constraints will be implemented for MyISAM tables as well.

Foreign key enforcement offers several benefits to database developers:

Do keep in mind that these benefits come at the cost of additional overhead for the database server to perform the necessary checks. Additional checking by the server affects performance, which for some applications may be sufficiently undesirable as to be avoided if possible. (Some major commercial applications have coded the foreign key logic at the application level for this reason.)

MySQL gives database developers the choice of which approach to use. If you don't need foreign keys and want to avoid the overhead associated with enforcing referential integrity, you can choose another storage engine instead, such as MyISAM. (For example, the MyISAM storage engine offers very fast performance for applications that perform only INSERT and SELECT operations. In this case, the table has no holes in the middle and the inserts can be performed concurrently with retrievals. See Section 7.3.3, “Concurrent Inserts”.)

If you choose not to take advantage of referential integrity checks, keep the following considerations in mind:

Be aware that the use of foreign keys can sometimes lead to problems:

Note that foreign keys in SQL are used to check and enforce referential integrity, not to join tables. If you want to get results from multiple tables from a SELECT statement, you do this by performing a join between them:

SELECT * FROM t1 INNER JOIN t2 ON t1.id = t2.id;

See Section 13.2.7.1, “JOIN Syntax”, and Section 3.6.6, “Using Foreign Keys”.

The FOREIGN KEY syntax without ON DELETE ... is often used by ODBC applications to produce automatic WHERE clauses.

Views (including updatable views) are implemented beginning with MySQL Server 5.0.1. See Chapter 19, Views.

Views are useful for allowing users to access a set of relations (tables) as if it were a single table, and limiting their access to just that. Views can also be used to restrict access to rows (a subset of a particular table). For access control to columns, you can also use the sophisticated privilege system in MySQL Server. See Section 5.8, “The MySQL Access Privilege System”.

In designing an implementation of views, our ambitious goal, as much as is possible within the confines of SQL, has been full compliance with “Codd's Rule #6” for relational database systems: “All views that are theoretically updatable, should in practice also be updatable.”

Standard SQL uses the C syntax /* this is a comment */ for comments, and MySQL Server supports this syntax as well. MySQL also support extensions to this syntax that allow MySQL-specific SQL to be embedded in the comment, as described in Section 9.4, “Comment Syntax”.

Standard SQL uses ‘--’ as a start-comment sequence. MySQL Server uses ‘#’ as the start comment character. MySQL Server 3.23.3 and up also supports a variant of the ‘--’ comment style. That is, the ‘--’ start-comment sequence must be followed by a space (or by a control character such as a newline). The space is required to prevent problems with automatically generated SQL queries that use constructs such as the following, where we automatically insert the value of the payment for payment:

UPDATE account SET credit=credit-payment

Consider about what happens if payment has a negative value such as -1:

UPDATE account SET credit=credit--1

credit--1 is a legal expression in SQL, but ‘--’ is interpreted as the start of a comment, part of the expression is discarded. The result is a statement that has a completely different meaning than intended:

UPDATE account SET credit=credit

The statement produces no change in value at all. This illustrates that allowing comments to start with ‘--’ can have serious consequences.

Using our implementation requires a space following the ‘--’ in order for it to be recognized as a start-comment sequence in MySQL Server 3.23.3 and newer. Therefore, credit--1 is safe to use.

Another safe feature is that the mysql command-line client ignores lines that start with ‘--’.

The following information is relevant only if you are running a MySQL version earlier than 3.23.3:

If you have an SQL script in a text file that contains ‘--’ comments, you should use the replace utility as follows to convert the comments to use ‘#’ characters before executing the script:

shell> replace " --" " #" < text-file-with-funny-comments.sql \
         | mysql db_name

That is safer than executing the script in the usual way:

shell> mysql db_name < text-file-with-funny-comments.sql

You can also edit the script file “in place” to change the ‘--’ comments to ‘#’ comments:

shell> replace " --" " #" -- text-file-with-funny-comments.sql

Change them back with this command:

shell> replace " #" " --" -- text-file-with-funny-comments.sql

See Section 8.18, “replace — A String-Replacement Utility”.

Normally, an error occurs when you try to INSERT or UPDATE a row that causes a primary key, unique key, or foreign key violation. If you are using a transactional storage engine such as InnoDB, MySQL automatically rolls back the statement. If you are using a non-transactional storage engine, MySQL stops processing the statement at the row for which the error occurred and leaves any remaining rows unprocessed.

If you want to ignore such key violations, MySQL supports an IGNORE keyword for INSERT and UPDATE. In this case, MySQL ignores any key violations and continues processing with the next row. See Section 13.2.4, “INSERT Syntax”, and Section 13.2.10, “UPDATE Syntax”.

You can get information about the number of rows actually inserted or updated with the mysql_info() C API function. In MySQL 4.1 and up, you also can use the SHOW WARNINGS statement. See Section 22.2.3.34, “mysql_info()”, and Section 13.5.4.25, “SHOW WARNINGS Syntax”.

Currently, only InnoDB tables support foreign keys. See Section 14.2.6.4, “FOREIGN KEY Constraints”. Foreign key support in MyISAM tables is scheduled for implementation in MySQL 5.2. See Section 1.6, “MySQL Development Roadmap”.

Before MySQL 5.0.2, MySQL is forgiving of illegal or improper data values and coerces them to legal values for data entry. In MySQL 5.0.2 and up, that remains the default behavior, but you can change the server SQL mode to select more traditional treatment of bad values such that the server rejects them and aborts the statement in which they occur. Section 5.2.5, “The Server SQL Mode”.

This section describes the default (forgiving) behavior of MySQL, as well as the newer strict SQL mode and how it differs.

If you are not using strict mode, then whenever you insert an “incorrect” value into a column, such as a NULL into a NOT NULL column or a too-large numeric value into a numeric column, MySQL sets the column to the “best possible value” instead of producing an error: The following rules describe in more detail how this works:

The reason for using the preceding rules in non-strict mode is that we can't check these conditions until the statement has begun executing. We can't just roll back if we encounter a problem after updating a few rows, because the storage engine may not support rollback. The option of terminating the statement is not that good; in this case, the update would be “half done,” which is probably the worst possible scenario. In this case, it's better to “do the best you can” and then continue as if nothing happened.

In MySQL 5.0.2 and up, you can select stricter treatment of input values by using the STRICT_TRANS_TABLES or STRICT_ALL_TABLES SQL modes:

SET sql_mode = 'STRICT_TRANS_TABLES';
SET sql_mode = 'STRICT_ALL_TABLES';

STRICT_TRANS_TABLES enables strict mode for transactional storage engines, and also to some extent for non-transactional engines. It works like this:

For even stricter checking, enable STRICT_ALL_TABLES. This is the same as STRICT_TRANS_TABLES except that for non-transactional storage engines, errors abort the statement even for bad data in rows following the first row. This means that if an error occurs partway through a multiple-row insert or update for a non-transactional table, a partial update results. Earlier rows are inserted or updated, but those from the point of the error on are not. To avoid this for non-transactional tables, either use single-row statements or else use STRICT_TRANS_TABLES if conversion warnings rather than errors are acceptable. To avoid problems in the first place, do not use MySQL to check column content. It is safest (and often faster) to let the application ensure that it passes only legal values to the database.

With either of the strict mode options, you can cause errors to be treated as warnings by using INSERT IGNORE or UPDATE IGNORE rather than INSERT or UPDATE without IGNORE.

ENUM and SET columns provide an efficient way to define columns that can contain only a given set of values. See Section 11.4.4, “The ENUM Type”, and Section 11.4.5, “The SET Type”. However, before MySQL 5.0.2, ENUM and SET columns do not provide true constraints on entry of invalid data:

As of MySQL 5.0.2, you can configure the server to use strict SQL mode. See Section 5.2.5, “The Server SQL Mode”. With strict mode enabled, the definition of a ENUM or SET column does act as a constraint on values entered into the column. An error occurs for values that do not satisfy these conditions:

Errors for invalid values can be suppressed in strict mode if you use INSERT IGNORE or UPDATE IGNORE. In this case, a warning is generated rather than an error. For ENUM, the value is inserted as the error member (0). For SET, the value is inserted as given except that any invalid substrings are deleted. For example, 'a,x,b,y' results in a value of 'a,b'.