Re: COPY and duplicates

On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 11:01:28AM -0500,
  Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 09:40:24AM -0400,
>   Ryan Mahoney <ryan@paymentalliance.net> wrote:
> > Is it possible for the COPY command to warn about duplicate key violations
> > (and not insert them...) but still proceed inserting the rows that do not
> > cause a violation?  If not, what is the quickest way to deal with this problem?
>
> You could copy the data into a temporary table and then insert just
> run record from a set with the same key into the real table.

As Ryan pointed out to me, I bolixed up the grammer in my response.

You can do want you want using copy to load a temporary table that
doesn't have a unique key constraint and then use insert to insert
data from a select on the temporary table using the distinct on clause
to pick one record from a set of records with the same key.