Re: most idiomatic way to "update or insert"?

Mark,
    It's not canonical by any means, but what I do is:

update foo set thing='stuff' where name = 'xx' and thing<>'stuff';
insert into foo (name, thing) (select 'xx' as name, 'stuff' as thing where
not exists (select 1 from foo where name='xx'));

    I believe if you put these on the same line it will be a single
transaction.  It has the benefit of not updating the row if there aren't
real changes.  It's plenty quick too, if name is indexed.

Thanks,
Peter Darley

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org]On Behalf Of Mark Harrison
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 4:26 PM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: [GENERAL] most idiomatic way to "update or insert"?


So I have some data that I want to put into a table.  If the
row already exists (as defined by the primary key), I would
like to update the row.  Otherwise, I would like to insert
the row.

I've been doing something like

delete from foo where name = 'xx';
insert into foo values('xx',1,2,...);

but I've been wondering if there's a more idiomatic or canonical
way to do this.

Many TIA,
Mark

--
Mark Harrison
Pixar Animation Studios

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