When you start using MySQL, you use a command prompt to enter the SQL statement. The statements can be quite lengthy, and a pain to modify. The simplest way of using MySQL is to use files containing the SQL statements to perform. For example, if you want to create a table called, search, you could create a file called called, createSearchTable.sql and load this file from the command prompt rather than type in a lengthy SQL statement to create the table.

Loading SQL Statements from a File

The SOURCE command is used to load the file from the command prompt.

mysql> SOURCE createSearchTable.sql

The sequence \. is a shorcut name for the SOURCE statement. The following does exactly the same thing as the above SOURCE statement.

mysql> \. createSearchTable.sql

Logging Output

The TEE statement may be used to log output from your SQL statements to a text file. The following command copies all output to the file log.txt so you can examine the results of running your queries.

mysql> TEE log.txt

You can turn off loging using the NOTEE statement.

mysql> NOTEE