A "BEFORE-INSERT"-trigger is the only way to realize same-table updates on an insert, and is only possible from MySQL 5.5+. However, the value of an auto-increment field is only available to an "AFTER-INSERT" trigger - it defaults to 0 in the BEFORE-case. Therefore the following example code which would set a previously-calculated surrogate key value based on the auto-increment value id
will compile, but not actually work since NEW.id will always be 0:
create table products(id int not null auto_increment, surrogatekey varchar(10), description text);
create trigger trgProductSurrogatekey before insert on product
for each row set NEW.surrogatekey =
(select surrogatekey from surrogatekeys where id = NEW.id);