MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

Acknowledgments

We’d first like to thank Debby Russell, our editor at O’Reilly Media, for supporting us through this endeavor and for being the organizing force behind the end-to-end project. Many other people at O’Reilly also played a big role in the book’s development, including Adam Witwer, the production editor, and Rob Romano, the illustrator; additional production services were provided by Argosy Publishing.

The role of the technical reviewers in the production of this book was absolutely critical. The scope of coverage included not just the MySQL stored program language but also five other development languages and many features of the MySQL 5.0 server itself. Furthermore, the stored program language was evolving as we constructed the book. Without the valuable inputs from our technical reviewers, we would have been unable to achieve any reasonable degree of accuracy and currency across the entire scope. Reviewers included Tim Allwine, Brian Aker, James Cooper, Greg Cottman, Paul DuBois, Andy Dustman, Peter Gulutzan, Mike Hillyer, Arjen Lentz, and Mark Matthews. Thanks guys!

To the open source community in general and to the MySQL development community in particular, we also give thanks. The availability of free (both as in beer and as in speech) software of such quality and innovation is a source of constant amazement and gratification. Many in the MySQL and associated communities contributed to the existence of this in so many ways.

We worked with some of the maintainers of the various open source interfaces to MySQL to ensure that these were able to support some of the new features introduced in MySQL 5.0. Thanks to Wez Furlong, Patrick Galbraith, and Andy Dustman in particular for their help in patching the PHP PDO, Perl DBI, and Python MySQLdb interfaces.

From Guy: On a personal note, I would like to—as always—thank my wife Jenni and children Christopher, Katherine, Michael, and William for putting up with me during this and other writing projects. Thanks with much love. Also—of course—thanks to Steven for working with me on this book.

From Steven: I have spent the last 10 years studying, working with, and writing about the Oracle PL/SQL language. That experience has demonstrated very clearly to me the value and importance of stored programs. I was very excited, therefore, when Guy invited me to work with him on a book about MySQL stored programs. I have no doubt that this new functionality will help extend the reach and usefulness of MySQL, and I thank Guy for the opportunity to help MySQL programmers make the most of this key open source relational database.