How to set a MySQL row to READ-ONLY?

This is likely to be business logic, which probably doesn’t belong in your data storage layer. However, it can nonetheless be accomplished using triggers.

You can create a BEFORE UPDATE trigger that raises an error if a “locked” record is about to be updated; since an error occurs before the operation is undertaken, MySQL ceases to proceed with it. If you also want to prevent the record from being deleted, you’d need to create a similar trigger BEFORE DELETE.

To determine whether a record is “locked”, you could create a boolean locked column:

ALTER TABLE my_table ADD COLUMN locked BOOLEAN NOT NULL DEFAULT FALSE;

DELIMITER ;;

CREATE TRIGGER foo_upd BEFORE UPDATE ON my_table FOR EACH ROW
IF OLD.locked THEN
  SIGNAL SQLSTATE '45000' SET MESSAGE_TEXT = 'Cannot update locked record';
END IF;;

CREATE TRIGGER foo_del BEFORE DELETE ON my_table FOR EACH ROW
IF OLD.locked THEN
  SIGNAL SQLSTATE '45000' SET MESSAGE_TEXT = 'Cannot delete locked record';
END IF;;

DELIMITER ;

UPDATE my_table SET locked = TRUE WHERE ...;

Note that SIGNAL was introduced in MySQL 5.5. In earlier versions, you must perform some erroneous action that causes MySQL to raise an error: I often call an non-existent procedure, e.g. with CALL raise_error;

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I cannot create an additional column on this table, but the row has a unique id in one of the columns, so how would I do this for that scenario?

Again, if you absolutely must place this logic in the storage layer—and cannot identify the locked records through any means other than the PK—you could hard-code the test into your trigger; for example, to “lock” the record with id_column = 1234:

DELIMITER ;;

CREATE TRIGGER foo_upd BEFORE UPDATE ON my_table FOR EACH ROW
IF OLD.id_column <=> 1234 THEN
  SIGNAL SQLSTATE '45000' SET MESSAGE_TEXT = 'Cannot update locked record';
END IF;;

CREATE TRIGGER foo_del BEFORE DELETE ON my_table FOR EACH ROW
IF OLD.id_column <=> 1234 THEN
  SIGNAL SQLSTATE '45000' SET MESSAGE_TEXT = 'Cannot delete locked record';
END IF;;

DELIMITER ;

But this is absolutely horrible and I would do almost anything to avoid it whenever possible.