MySQL 5.7 Release Notes
A trigger is a named database object that is associated with a table, and that activates when a particular event occurs for the table. Some uses for triggers are to perform checks of values to be inserted into a table or to perform calculations on values involved in an update.
A trigger is defined to activate when a statement inserts, updates,
or deletes rows in the associated table. These row operations are
trigger events. For example, rows can be inserted by
INSERT or LOAD
DATA statements, and an insert trigger activates for each
inserted row. A trigger can be set to activate either before or
after the trigger event. For example, you can have a trigger
activate before each row that is inserted into a table or after each
row that is updated.
Important
MySQL triggers activate only for changes made to tables by SQL
statements. This includes changes to base tables that underlie
updatable views. Triggers do not activate for changes to tables
made by APIs that do not transmit SQL statements to the MySQL
Server. This means that triggers are not activated by updates made
using the NDB API.
Triggers are not activated by changes in
INFORMATION_SCHEMA or
performance_schema tables. Those tables are
actually views and triggers are not permitted on views.
The following sections describe the syntax for creating and dropping triggers, show some examples of how to use them, and indicate how to obtain trigger metadata.
Additional Resources
You may find the MySQL User Forums helpful when working with triggers.
For answers to commonly asked questions regarding triggers in MySQL, see Section A.5, “MySQL 5.7 FAQ: Triggers”.
There are some restrictions on the use of triggers; see Section 23.8, “Restrictions on Stored Programs”.
Binary logging for triggers takes place as described in Section 23.7, “Stored Program Binary Logging”.