Events

Events are a new form of stored code in MySQL 5.1. They are akin to cron jobs but are completely internal to the MySQL server. You can create events that execute SQL code once at a specific time, or frequently at a specified interval. The usual practice is to wrap the complex SQL in a stored procedure, so the event merely needs to perform a CALL.

Events are initiated by a separate event scheduler thread, because they have nothing to do with connections. They accept no inputs and return no values—there’s no connection for them to get inputs from or return values to. You can see the commands they execute in the server log, if it’s enabled, but it can be hard to tell that those commands were executed from an event. You can also look in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.EVENTS table to see an event’s status, such as the last time it was executed.