[kbenson]

I'm currently really feeling the limitations of MySQL's auto-increment and of InnoDB's inability to deal with constraints that include multiple tables for a complex data source I am trying to efficiently represent in a local schema. Having a trigger which calls a function seems so much more powerful (if admittedly more boilerplate for the simple case).

I've always shied away from UDF, but that's more from not wanting another language to deal with and since there's fairly poor support for them in MySQL (which I'm stuck with). For example, the default mysqldump options for all databases don't include UDF unless you specifically request them with--routines. :/