Question

I don’t have access, right now, to test this, but is the following — or something like it, as my off-the-top-of-my-head code mightn’t be perfect! — possible in Oracle:

declare
  myRecord myTable%ROWTYPE;
begin
  select * into myRecord from myTable where key = 123;
  myRecord.key   := 456;
  myRecord.value := myRecord.value + 50;
  insert into myTable select * from table(myRecord);
end;

i.e., We copy the record from myTable — which may have, say, 100 fields — with key 123 into a variable with the same schema, then update a few of the copied record’s fields (e.g., here, a new key and an updated value) before inserting it back into the original table: Effectively, duplicating the original record with some modifications, where necessary?

I know there are other ways to do this, but this seems quite neat, in comparison to what else I’ve seen…if it were to work, of course!

Answer 1

INSERT INTO myTable VALUES myRecord;

Some good examples on this site: http://psoug.org/reference/insert.html I guess you don’t want to do something like this because you have a lot of columns?

INSERT INTO myTable
  SELECT 456, value+50, colx, coly
     FROM myTable
     WHERE key = 123;