Re: Inserting default values into execute_values

> > On 3/31/20 3:27 PM, Stephen Lagree wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I am trying to insert into a table to generate sequential ids.  Is
> >> there a way to do this repeatedly using execute_values if there is
> >> only one column and it is auto incremented?

The point of execute_values is to convert a sequence of records into a
VALUES thing (that's what the placeholder is for) and shoot it to the
db in one go. I think your task is much simpler than that.

In order to do what you want to do you use execute_batch and use a
list of empty tuples for instance;

    psycopg2.extras.execute_batch(cur, "insert into testins (id)
values (default)", [() for i in range(10)])

but I think this is still silly: you are still sending a lot of
strings from client to serve which do very little.

You can easily do the same loop entirely in the database, executing a
statement such as:

    do $$
    declare i int;
    begin
        for i in select * from generate_series(1, 10)
        loop
            insert into testins (id) values (default);
        end loop;
    end
    $$ language plpgsql;

but this is still means doing n separate inserts. Even faster would be
just not rely on the DEFAULT literal, if you know the table you are
inserting into or you don't mind introspecting the schema:

    insert into testins (id) select nextval('testins_id_seq') from
generate_series(1, 10);

On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 at 12:08, Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com> wrote:

> > A solution from Daniele Varrazzo.  I can't find the mailing list post
> > where it appeared, just where I use it in code:


Thank you for fishing that out! But I think since the introduction of
the 'psycopg2.sql' module the correct way to do that is to use
something like 'sql.SQL("DEFAULT")' to compose into a query.

Cheers,

-- Daniele