You are having problems with node's asynchronous nature, a very common issue when coming to Node. You also had a small but significant error in your code (you have 'sql'
as a quoted string), but here is something structurally similar that should point you in the right direction.
var mysql = require('mysql');
var connection = mysql.createConnection({
host : 'locahost',
user : 'foo',
password : 'bar',
database : 'test'
});
// the callback inside connect is called when the connection is good
connection.connect(function(err){
var sql = "select 'Joe' as name from dual";
connection.query(sql, function(err, rows, fields) {
if (err) return console.log(err);
// you need to end your connection inside here.
connection.end();
console.log(rows[0].name);
});
});
You will likely start wondering about ways to avoid all these callbacks. You may wish to look at my answer to this question for a more extended mysql example as well as an alternative implementation which offers an alternative to callback-mania.