I just found a really interesting BLAHG post by some guy who did some sneaky mysql functionry to emulate CREATE TRIGGER `some_table___select` BEFORE SELECT ON `some_table` functionality in mysql.

Hm, the article contained in the link above was written in mid-late-2005. It is now the beginnig of 2008. I wondered if his little khack would still work..

The first step worked fine. Once I hit the function creation step, I ran into a problem though:

 mysql> create function f_log_select(
     ->     p_log_schema varchar(64)
     -> ,   p_log_view   varchar(64)
     -> )
     -> returns int unsigned
     -> NOT DETERMINISTIC
     -> begin
     ->     insert 
     ->     into   select_log(
     ->                log_who    
     ->            ,   log_conn   
     ->            ,   log_when  
     ->            ,   log_schema 
     ->            ,   log_view   
     ->            ) values (
     ->                current_user()
     ->            ,   connection_id()
     ->            ,   now()
     ->            ,   p_log_schema
     ->            ,   p_log_view
     ->            );
     ->     return last_insert_id();
     -> end;
     -> $$
 ERROR 1418 (HY000): This function has none of DETERMINISTIC, NO SQL, or READS SQL DATA in its 
 declaration and binary logging is enabled (you *might* want to use the less safe 
 log_bin_trust_function_creators variable)

Luckily, this was an *easy* fix!

 SET GLOBAL log_bin_trust_function_creators=1;

I was then able to create the f_log_select function without encountering any further issues.

I followed the rest of the steps documented and I can confirm that as of February, 2008, MySQL 5.x still allows this functionality/behavior!

Very neat indeed!