MySql Error: Can't update table in stored function/trigger because it is already used by statement which invoked this stored function/trigger

You cannot change a table while the INSERT trigger is firing. The INSERT might do some locking which could result in a deadlock. Also, updating the table from a trigger would then cause the same trigger to fire again in an infinite recursive loop. Both of these reasons are why MySQL prevents you from doing this.

However, depending on what you're trying to achieve, you can access the new values by using NEW.fieldname or even the old values--if doing an UPDATE--with OLD.

If you had a row named full_brand_name and you wanted to use the first two letters as a short name in the field small_name you could use:

CREATE TRIGGER `capital` BEFORE INSERT ON `brandnames`
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
  SET NEW.short_name = CONCAT(UCASE(LEFT(NEW.full_name,1)) , LCASE(SUBSTRING(NEW.full_name,2)))
END

The correct syntax is:

FOR EACH ROW SET NEW.bname = CONCAT( UCASE( LEFT( NEW.bname, 1 ) )
                                   , LCASE( SUBSTRING( NEW.bname, 2 ) ) )

A "BEFORE-INSERT"-trigger is the only way to realize same-table updates on an insert, and is only possible from MySQL 5.5+. However, the value of an auto-increment field is only available to an "AFTER-INSERT" trigger - it defaults to 0 in the BEFORE-case. Therefore the following example code which would set a previously-calculated surrogate key value based on the auto-increment value id will compile, but not actually work since NEW.id will always be 0:

create table products(id int not null auto_increment, surrogatekey varchar(10), description text);
create trigger trgProductSurrogatekey before insert on product
for each row set NEW.surrogatekey = 
  (select surrogatekey from surrogatekeys where id = NEW.id);