Question

I want to update a record which may or may not be present in a table. If it is not present in the database then it will be inserted.

To prevent from select I am using UPDATE statement first and checking affected_rows > 0 if not then I am inserting this record into the table.

I was wondering if there is a better way to do this?

Answer 1

You could use INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE syntax:

INSERT INTO table (a,b,c) VALUES (1,2,3)
  ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE c=c+1;

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/insert-on-duplicate.html

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The difference between this and REPLACE (Femaref’s answer) is that REPLACE will delete the old row and then insert a new row if a key is duplicated, while this will update the existing row.