Question

Not sure I’m in the correct here.

I have a stored procedure in MySQL, which limits results like so:

...
ORDER BY param_sort1, param_sort2
LIMIT param_start, param_end
;

Both *param_start* and *param_end* are passing in as integers like so:

...
IN `param_start` INT, 
IN `param_end` INT
...

While this is working on my developement server using the latest MySQL, the production server is still running MySQL 5.0.88 and throws a syntax error on the LIMIT clause. If I comment it out, it works correctly.

I’m fairly new to MySQL and completely clueless regarding how to do this correctly in older versions of MySQL.

Question:
Any tips how to get this working?

THANKS!

Answer 1

You cannot use variables or parameters for LIMIT arguments in MySQL 5.0. This feature was supported in MySQL 5.5.

As a workaround – construct a query string and execute it using prepared statements.

---

something like this (edited):

CREATE PROCEDURE procedure(IN param_start INT, IN param_end INT)
BEGIN
  SET @param_start = param_start;
  SET @param_end = param_end;
  SET @sql = CONCAT('SELECT * FROM table LIMIT ?, ?');
  PREPARE stmt FROM @sql;
  EXECUTE stmt USING @param_start, @param_end;
  DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt;
END