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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T21:45:27+00:00

I want to execute a statement such as UPDATE myTable SET myField = myField

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I want to execute a statement such as

UPDATE myTable SET myField = myField + 1

in an Android SQLite database. (Yes, I want to increment myField for all records.)

My first idea was to use execSQL, but the documentation says:

execute a single SQL statement that is NOT a SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE.

…

For UPDATE statements, use any of the following instead.
• update(String, ContentValues, String, String[])
• updateWithOnConflict(String, ContentValues, String, String[], int)

However, as far as I can see, this type of UPDATE cannot be done with the SQLiteDatabase.update method. Did I miss some clever trick to do this with SQLiteDatabase.update or is the documentation broken? (Running the above SQL with execSQL works fine, although the documentation claims otherwise.)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That method is just fine. It has to be, because the underlying C API does not distinguish those. Any statement that does not return value can be executed with execSQL.

    The update* and insert* are legitimate helper methods, but the documentation would really do better if it didn’t claim they must be used for all inserts/updates since they simply can’t be (ever used insert into table select ...? I do that all the time!)

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