how to do a "trial" query in mysql

[sfullman]

I am getting a second server from the same ISP, but a different physical machine. I am writing an automated routine to check the health of all systems in the primary, including mySQL of course.

It seems sensible to me that the surest way to know if the db is doing what I want it to is to do a trial of the actual query (an INSERT statement) which I am running on a table.

My question is can you run a trial query which does not insert the data but would instead return "yeah this query would run just fine" or "this would violate a key because the ID field is already full"

I'm looking through docs, think this has something to do with commit and rollback maybe.

Thank you.

[bradgrafelman]

My guess is that you're right; start a transaction, do any operations you want to test, record the results, and then rollback the transaction so that no changes are actually made.