MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

How Fast Is the Stored Program Language?

It would be terribly unfair of us to expect the first release of the MySQL stored program language to be blisteringly fast. After all, languages such as Perl and PHP have been the subject of tweaking and optimization for about a decade, while the latest generation of programming languages—.NET and Java—have been the subject of a shorter but more intensive optimization process by some of the biggest software companies in the world. So right from the start, we expected that the MySQL stored program language would lag in comparison with the other languages commonly used in the MySQL world.

Still, we felt it was important to get a sense of the raw performance of the language. So we put together a number of test scripts. First off, we wanted to see how quickly the stored program language could crunch numbers. Stored programs generally do not perform computationally expensive operations, but—given that you sometimes have a choice between various application tiers when performing some computationally intensive task—it’s worth knowing if the stored program language is up to the job.

To test basic compute performance, we wrote a stored program that determines the number of prime numbers less than a given input number. (We’re sure that some of you will know better algorithms, but remember that the point is to compare languages, not to calculate prime numbers in the most efficient manner possible.) The stored program is shown in Example 22-1 ...