Optimizing Stored Program Code

In this chapter, we look at techniques for optimizing the stored program code itself.

As we have said before, the performance of a typical stored program will primarily depend on the performance of the SQL in that stored program. This is why we have devoted several chapters to showing how to tune MySQL SQL statements.

As with any language, however, it is possible to write inefficient code in the MySQL stored program language itself. So in this chapter, we're going to assume that we have tuned our stored program's SQL statements and are now ready to tune the stored program code.

Before we dig into tuning stored program code we will briefly review the performance characteristics of stored programs and look at the circumstances under which stored programs can improve application performance. For example, under certain circumstances, we can use a stored program in place of SQL statements that are difficult to optimize. Stored programs can also improve the performance of network-intensive operations. However, note that stored programs are not, in general, a good solution when we want to do mathematically intensive computation.