MySQL Variable Assignment via Procedure Not Working Correctly - mysql

Question

In the code below, I'm trying go through the results of endDateTable row by row, comparing the current row's endDate to the previous row's endDate. If there has been any change since the previous, we increment #revisionNum. However, upon populating the new table, all of the #revisionNum entries are 0. What am I doing wrong?
NOTE: I'm using prepared statements in this manner since doing a straightforward SELECT into a variable gives a syntax error due to the LIMIT clause not allowing a variable in our version of MySQL.
BEGIN
DECLARE _currentEndDate DATETIME DEFAULT now();
DECLARE _priorEndDate DATETIME DEFAULT now();
SET #ResultsCount = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM mainTable);
SET #j = 0;
WHILE #j < #ResultsCount DO
SET #revisionNum = 0;
/*CURRENT END DATE*/
SET #appResultQueryCurrent = CONCAT('
SELECT
end_date
INTO _currentEndDate
FROM endDateTable
LIMIT ', #j, ', 1'
);
PREPARE currentQueryStmt FROM #appResultQueryCurrent;
EXECUTE currentQueryStmt;
/*PREVIOUS END DATE*/
SET #appResultQueryPrior = CONCAT('
SELECT
end_date
INTO _priorAppEndDate
FROM endDateTable
LIMIT ', IF(#j = 0, 0, #j - 1), ', 1'
);
PREPARE priorQueryStmt FROM #appResultQueryPrior;
EXECUTE priorQueryStmt;
SET #revisionNum = IF(
#j = 0 OR (_currentEndDate = _priorEndDate),
#revisionNum,
IF(
_currentEndDate != _priorEndDate,
#revisionNum + 1,
#revisionNum
)
);
INSERT INTO finalTable (RevisionNum)
SELECT
#revisionNum AS RevisionNum
FROM endDateTable;
SET #j = #j +1;
END WHILE;
END $$

Answer 1

You don't need a loop, you can use INSERT INTO ... SELECT ..., incrementing the variable in the select query.
You also need an ORDER BY criteria to specify how to order the rows when comparing one row to the previous row.
INSERT INTO finalTable (RevisionNum, otherColumn)
SELECT revision, otherColumn
FROM (
SELECT IF(end_date = #prev_end_date, #revision, #revision := #revision + 1) AS revision,
#prev_end_date := end_date,
otherColumn
FROM endDateTable
CROSS JOIN (SELECT #prev_end_date := NULL, #revision := -1) AS vars
ORDER BY id) AS x
DEMO

Answer 2

The offset value in the LIMIT clause is tenuous without an ORDER BY.
Without an ORDER BY clause, MySQL is free to return results in any sequence.
There is no guarantee that LIMIT 41,1 will return the row before LIMIT 42,1, or that it won't return the exact same row as LIMIT 13,1 did.
(A table in a relational database represents an unordered set of tuples, there is no guaranteed "order" or rows in a table.)
But just adding ORDER BY to the queries isn't enough to fix the Rube-Goldberg-esque rigmarole.
In the code shown, it looks like each time through the loop, we're inserting a copy of endDateTable into finalTable. If that's 1,000 rows in endDateTable, we're going to get 1,000,000 rows (1,000 x 1,000) inserted into finalTable. Not at all clear why we need so many copies.
Given the code shown, it's not clear what the objective is. Looks like we are conditionally incrementing revisionNum, the end result of which is the highest revision num. Just guessing here.
If there is some kind of requirement to do this in a LOOP construct, within a procedure, I'd think we'd do a cursor loop. And we can use procedure variables vs user-defined variables.
Something along these lines:
BEGIN
DECLARE ld_current_end_date DATETIME;
DECLARE ld_prior_end_date DATETIME;
DECLARE li_done INT;
DECLARE li_revision_num INT;
DECLARE lcsr_end_date CURSOR FOR SELECT t.end_date FROM `endDateTable` t ORDER BY NULL;
DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND SET li_done = TRUE;
SET li_done = FALSE;
SET li_revision_num = 0;
OPEN lcsr_end_date;
FETCH lcsr_end_date INTO ld_current_end_date;
SET ld_prior_end_date = ld_current_end_date;
WHILE NOT li_done DO
SET li_revision_num = li_revision_num + IF( ld_current_end_date <=> ld_prior_end_date ,0,1);
SET ld_prior_end_date := ld_current_end_date;
FETCH lcsr_end_date INTO ld_current_end_date;
END WHILE;
CLOSE lcsr_end_date;
INSERT INTO `finalTable` (revisionnum) VALUES (li_revision_num);
END $$
Note the "order by" clause on the SELECT, its not clear what the rows should be ordered on, so we're using a literal as a placeholder.
As the end result, we insert a single row into finalTable.
Again, it's not clear what the code in the question is supposed to achieve, but doing a cursor loop across ordered rows would be much more efficient than a bazillion dynamic SQL executions fetching individual rows.