Question

I want to insert records into the “books” table for every author in the “author” table. In other words, if this represented the author table:

> 1 - "Herman Melville" 
> 2 - "Stephen King" 
> 3 - "Truman Capote"

…then, the insert would yield these results in the “book” table:

> 'Hello World' - 1
> 'Hello World' - 2
> 'Hello World' - 3

I have the following INSERT statement (it’s actually a crude example, but it demonstrates the objective):

INSERT INTO books (title, author_id) VALUES ('Hello World', SELECT id FROM author);

Unfortunately, this fails and I’m uncertain how to get each of the “id” values from the “author” table.

Answer 1

It’s not clear why you’d want to insert the same entry for each author, but you could use a SELECT as the source for your INSERT, like this:

INSERT INTO books (title, author_id)
    SELECT 'Hello World', id
    FROM author

Edit: for some more info, check the docs for INSERT; as you can see, the source can be either DEFAULT VALUES, VALUES or a query.