Question

I’m hoping to be able to insert/update multiple rows of a table in a single call, but the data I’m pushing into the database might be new and might not. Basically I have a table columns a,b,c. a,b is unique.

So if the existing table looks like:

a|b|c
-----
1|1|1
1|2|3

I wanted to do something like

INSERT INTO tbl (a,b,c) VALUES (1,1,2), (2,3,4), (5,6,7);

I was hoping something like

INSERT INTO tbl (a,b,c) VALUES (1,1,2), (2,3,4), (5,6,7) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE c=c;

Would work but that just uses the ‘c’ currently in the DB. Is there a way to tell it to use the new value for c, or some other way to achieve the same thing? This example uses 3 sets of values, but my actual will use 20-30, which is why I’d rather not have to loop through if possible.

I’m aware of how I’d achieve it by looping through all the values, so only really need guidance on if it’s possible in a single, or less than n+1 or so queries.

Answer 1

INSERT INTO tbl (a,b,c) VALUES (1,1,2), (2,3,4), (5,6,7) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE c=VALUES(c)

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/insert-on-duplicate.html