Question

I’m trying to UPDATE a column for a user, so that they can only ADD a value to the existing value. So for example, if the table looked like this:

UserID 3  
Total  12

User adds 4, so it’s changed to:

UserID 3  
Total  16

I could obviously do this by doing a query, getting the column value, adding it to the new value, and then updating that column… but I was wondering if there was a way to do it without using a SELECT statement first. Perhaps something using SUM()?

So the query might go:

UPDATE Users SET Total=SUM(Total + :total) WHERE UserID = :userID;

If so, what’s the correct syntax?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You don’t need the SUM() since you are just adding the values, SUM() adds the values of a column together.

UPDATE Users 
SET Total= Total + :total 
WHERE UserID = :userID;