Question

I am doing a lot of trial and error with some SQL query in MySQL console e.g.

select fname, age, address from person where lname = ?;

I want to get a prompt asking me for the value of lname, so that I can repeat the query with different values easily. The ? works in case the query is from Java code.

Is it possible in MySQL console, if yes, how?

Answer 1

This is not possible.

You may want to create a stored procedure such as

DELIMITER //
CREATE PROCEDURE GetPerson(p_lname VARCHAR(50))
BEGIN
    SELECT fname, age, address FROM person WHERE lname = p_lname;
END //
DELIMITER ;

and then be able to

mysql> CALL GetPerson('smith');

But this is pretty much as far as you can go.

mysql client’s purpose is to run SQL queries (and manage the service), SQL is a query language, not meant for user interaction.