Question

I am currently working on a PHP project with an Oracle database. To update a table, the php code I’m working with uses a SQL “MERGE INTO” method to loop through a table and see if values for multiple records exist in another table. If they don’t exist yet, the values are inserted into my table. If the values already exist, nothing happens.

I would like to have another query run after this that uses the auto incremented id’s created in the MERGE INTO query. Is there a way to get an array of the newly created ids? I was hoping for something like mysql_insert_id, but I haven’t found anything like that yet.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Oracle has supported the MERGE syntax since 9i. Haven’t tried, but you might be able to use the RETURNING clause on the MERGE statement…

Oracle uses sequences for handling automatically incremented values. Once you’ve created a sequence, you can use:

sequence_name.CURVAL

..to get the current value, like what mysql_insert_id would return. To populate a primary key, you’d use:

sequence_name.NEXTVAL

To populate a primary in an INSERT statement, you’d use:

INSERT INTO your_table
  (pk_id, ..
VALUES
  (your_sequence.NEXTVAL, ...)

You can use triggers as an alternative, but they won’t return the current value.