You can declare local variables in MySQL triggers, with the DECLARE syntax.
Here's an example:
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS foo;
CREATE TABLE FOO (
i SERIAL PRIMARY KEY
);
DELIMITER //
DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS bar //
CREATE TRIGGER bar AFTER INSERT ON foo
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
DECLARE x INT;
SET x = NEW.i;
SET @a = x; -- set user variable outside trigger
END//
DELIMITER ;
SET @a = 0;
SELECT @a; -- returns 0
INSERT INTO foo () VALUES ();
SELECT @a; -- returns 1, the value it got during the trigger
When you assign a value to a variable, you must ensure that the query returns only a single value, not a set of rows or a set of columns. For instance, if your query returns a single value in practice, it's okay but as soon as it returns more than one row, you get "ERROR 1242: Subquery returns more than 1 row".
You can use LIMIT or MAX() to make sure that the local variable is set to a single value.
CREATE TRIGGER bar AFTER INSERT ON foo
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
DECLARE x INT;
SET x = (SELECT age FROM users WHERE name = 'Bill');
-- ERROR 1242 if more than one row with 'Bill'
END//
CREATE TRIGGER bar AFTER INSERT ON foo
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
DECLARE x INT;
SET x = (SELECT MAX(age) FROM users WHERE name = 'Bill');
-- OK even when more than one row with 'Bill'
END//