Delimiters in MySQL

Question

I often see people are using Delimiters. I tried myself to find out what are delimiters and what is their purpose. After 20 minutes of googling, I was not able to find an an

Answer 1

When you create a stored routine that has a BEGIN...END block, statements within the block are terminated by semicolon (;). But the CREATE PROCEDURE statement also needs a terminator. So it becomes ambiguous whether the semicolon within the body of the routine terminates CREATE PROCEDURE, or terminates one of the statements within the body of the procedure.

The way to resolve the ambiguity is to declare a distinct string (which must not occur within the body of the procedure) that the MySQL client recognizes as the true terminator for the CREATE PROCEDURE statement.