Question

I am a complete newbie to MySql so please be gentle.

Is there an equivalent of the RETURNING clause in Oracle or the Inserted'/'Deleted tables in SQL Server in MySQL? What I want to do is the following:

• Delete a set of rows from table A

• Insert the deleted set of rows into table B.

  Please help!

Thanks

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you can’t do both insertion and deletion in one query, but you can do it all in one transaction if you are using a transactional store engine (like InnoDB). Moreover, RETURNING is supported by Oracle and PostgreSQL but not by MySQL and therefore you need to write separate delete and insert statements.

Using a transaction however, will guarantee that only the successfully copied data will be deleted from tableA. Consider the following:

begin transaction;
insert into tableB select * from tableA where 'your_condition_here';
delete from tableA where 'your_condition_here';
commit;