MySQL – How to Write Loop in MySQL

Since, I have written courses on MySQL, I quite often get emails about MySQL courses. Here is the question, which I have received quite often.

“How do I loop queries in MySQL?”

Well, currently MySQL does not allow to write loops with the help of ad-hoc SQL. You have to write stored procedure (routine) for the same.

Here is the example, how we can create a procedure in MySQL which will look over the code. In this example I have used SELECT 1 statement and looped over it. In reality you can put there any code and loop over it. This procedure accepts one parameter which is the number of the count the loop will iterate itself.

delimiter //
CREATE PROCEDURE doiterate(p1 INT)
BEGIN
label1: LOOP
SET p1 = p1 - 1;
IF p1  > 0 THEN
SELECT 1;
ITERATE label1;
END IF;
LEAVE label1;
END LOOP label1;
END//
delimiter ;

CALL doiterate(100);

You can also use WHILE to loop as well, we will see that in future blog posts.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)