One missing feature in our stored procedures and functions is that, if there’s an exception (error), you don’t know the error number or sqlstate or error message. The plan is there, of course, WL#2111 Stored Procedures: Implement GET DIAGNOSTICS but I haven’t ticked the architecture review box, and the best prospect for a volunteer is busy with performance schema work.

However, there is a way to get this in the next MySQL 5.4 (which is called mysql-next on launchpad and which will almost certainly become the September milestone). Use RESIGNAL.

For space reasons I’m only going to illustrate how to do this to find out the SQLSTATE. I think bright souls will realize it’s simple, though tedious, to extend this so you can get the error number too.

I …

I suppose it looks odd that many of the “6.x” features I’ve blogged about are now “5.4″ features. Sorry about the surprise. In mitigation I observe that this means some things are now scheduled a bit quicker, and some are a lot better than expected. Sometimes it’s hard to know till tests are in.

The current server 5.4 download is here:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.4.html.
It does not have all the features yet that we have announced as 5.4.

The features in the current 5.4 download are:

* Scalability, that is, it works faster if you add cores or processors.
A lot of the work for this happened outside the MySQL group per se, it’s lovely to have bunches of performance experts from elsewhere in Sun Microsystems, also known as Sun Classic, doing the tweaks for us. Tests show that 5.4 is faster than any variant, whether genuine MySQL or not.

There’s a …