Reading the MySQL Manual

I was asked the question today, “How do I show the details of a Stored Procedure in MySQL. The SHOW PROCEDURE ‘name’ didn’t work.”.

The obvious answer was SELECT ROUTINE_NAME,ROUTINE_DEFINITION FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES, given I like to use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA whenever possible. This lead me to think was is the corresponding SHOW command. A quick manual search got me to SHOW CREATE PROCEDURE .

What was interesting was not this, but the list of other SHOW commands I didn’t know. I did not know about SHOW MUTEX STATUS , SHOW OPEN TABLES and SHOW PROCEDURE CODE for example.

It pays if you have free time (who ever has that), to re-read the manual, or at least a detailed index regularly. I’m sure there are plenty more helpful tips out there. Now just what does the output of these new commands really do, and does it really help. If only I could get commands to the stuff I really want.

Tagged with: Databases General MySQL

Related Posts

Improving container security in your CI/CD pipeline

At PyCon AU 2026 , the presentation Your Python container is 90% stuff you didn’t ask for by Scott Norris at Chainguard really exposed the impact of being lazy in container management for security purposes.

Read more

My take on PyCon Australia 2026

PyCon AU 2026 held in Brisbane this week was a five day event for the Python community. With specialized tracks and dedicated tutorial and engineering days there was a wide variety of content available.

Read more

Fixing Old Software Bugs Without Thinking

I previously came across an issue in my benchmarking work where I relied on the Latency Histogram section of sysbench output. On Linux it worked fine — I generally ran my workload there, so it never mattered.

Read more