I think I’m probably looking at this the complete wrong way. I have a stored procedure that returns a (potentially large, but usually not) result set. That set gets put into a table on the web via PHP. I’m going to implement some AJAX for stuff like dynamic reordering and things. The stored procedure takes one to two seconds to run, so it would be nice if I could store that final table somewhere that I can access it faster once it’s been run. More specifically, the SP is a search function; so I want the user to be able to do the search, but then run an ORDER BY on the returned data without having to redo the whole search to get that data again.
What comes to mind is if there is a way to get results from the stored procedure without it terminating, so I can use a temp table. I know I could use a permanent table, but then I’d run into trouble if two people were trying to use it at the same time.
A short and simple answer to the question: ‘is a way to get results from the stored procedure without it terminating?’: No, there isn’t. How else would the SP return the resultset?
2 seconds does sound like an awfully long time, perhaps you could post the SP code, so we can look at ways to speed up the query’s you use. It might also prove useful to give some more info on your tables (indeces, primary keys… ).
If all else fails, you might consider looking into JavaScript table sorters… but again: some code might help here