Played uninspired poker again tonight, so before bed trying to wash the bad taste out of my mouth with a little light reading on stored procedures in MySQL with PHP:
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?98,19146,19393Doesn't look promising.
Lately, I've been using heredocs myself. Haven't had any problems thus far. You could create a file to serve as a repository of stored queries like the following:
$SQL['join1'] = <<<SQLJOIN
SELECT $_requested_fields
FROM $_table1
LEFT JOIN $_table2 ON {$_table1}.{$_foreign_key}
WHERE {$_table1}.{$_primary_key} = {$_table2}.{$_foreign_key}
SQLJOIN;
Not sure what the performance implications are exactly.