MySQL command-line tip: compare result sets

Here’s a quick productivity tip: when optimizing queries by rewriting them to different forms that should return the same results, you can verify that you get the same results by taking a checksum of them.

Just set your pager to md5sum:

mysql> pager md5sum -
PAGER set to 'md5sum -'
mysql> select * from test;
a09bc56ac9aa0cbcc659c3d566c2c7e4  -
4096 rows in set (0.00 sec)