I recently wrote a blog entry (on my Postgres blog) about hiding SQL in a stored procedure, Hiding SQL in a Stored Procedure. I decided to see if I could convert that same concept to a MySQL stored procedure.

It doesn't work exactly the same. For one, the syntax is a little different. I expected that and the syntax differences really aren't that bad. Minor tweaks really.

The second issue is the major one. While I could write the proc and return a result set, I am not, as far as I can tell, able to treat the procedure as a table. In Postgres, I created a function with a set output. Unfortunately, MySQL does not allow sets as a function result. You can return a set from a procedure though, as odd as that sounds.

So here is what I found.

My create table command and inserts ran …