Quickly Debugging Stored Procedures, Functions, Triggers, and Events with RESIGNAL

I was recently debugging a stored procedure and could not easily identify the underlying reason for why it was failing. It had a standard exit handler catch-all for SQLEXCEPTION, which was:

DECLARE EXIT HANDLER FOR SQLEXCEPTION
BEGIN
SELECT ...;
END;

When there was an error, it didn’t really output anything useful. As of MySQL 5.5, there is RESIGNAL: “RESIGNAL passes on the error condition information that is available during execution of a condition handler within a compound statement inside a stored procedure or function, trigger, or event.” http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/resignal.html There is also some good information about it here as well: https://staging-mdb.com/kb/en/resignal/ It is very simple to use, just add it (though it is much more robust that just this – see above link):

DECLARE EXIT HANDLER FOR SQLEXCEPTION
BEGIN
SELECT ...;
RESIGNAL;
END;

By just adding RESIGNAL, in addition to what was output by the SELECT, we now see the actual error printed immediately after, for instance:

mysql> call my_proc('abc');
+---------+---------+-------+
| STATUS  | Records | Query |
+---------+---------+-------+
| ....... | NULL    | NULL  |
+---------+---------+-------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

ERROR 1146 (42S02): Table 'db1.t1' doesn't exist

Notice the last line is what you are looking for (when troubleshooting). As I mentioned, this is available as of MySQL and MariaDB 5.5. If you are using MySQL 5.6 or MariaDB 10.0, I would recommend skipping RESIGNAL and using GET DIAGNOSTICS within your exit handler to obtain the exact error code, SQL state, and error message *all* of the time. I cover using GET DIAGNOSTICS here, if interested. Hope this helps.