A trigger is a named database object that is associated with a table, and that activates when a particular event occurs for the table. Some uses for triggers are to perform checks of values to be inserted into a table or to perform calculations on values involved in an update.
A trigger is defined to activate when an
INSERT,
DELETE, or
UPDATE statement executes for the
associated table. A trigger can be set to activate either before or
after the triggering statement. For example, you can have a trigger
activate before each row that is inserted into a table or after each
row that is updated.
MySQL triggers are activated by SQL statements
only. They are not activated by changes in
views, nor by changes to tables made by APIs that do not transmit
SQL statements to the MySQL Server. This means that triggers are
not activated by changes in INFORMATION_SCHEMA
or performance_schema tables, because these
tables are actually views.
To use triggers if you have upgraded to MySQL 5.5 from an older release that did not support triggers, you should upgrade your grant tables so that they contain the trigger-related privileges. See Section 4.4.7, “mysql_upgrade — Check Tables for MySQL Upgrade”.
The following discussion describes the syntax for creating and dropping triggers, and shows some examples of how to use them.
Additional Resources
You may find the Triggers User Forum of use when working with views.
For answers to some commonly asked questions regarding triggers in MySQL, see Section B.5, “MySQL 5.5 FAQ: Triggers”.
There are some restrictions on the use of triggers; see Section E.1, “Restrictions on Stored Routines, Triggers, and Events”.
Binary logging for triggers takes place as described in Section 19.7, “Binary Logging of Stored Programs”.