Question

I’ve just imported a bunch of data to a MySQL table and I have a column “GUID” that I want to basically fill down all existing rows with new and unique random GUID’s.

How do I do this in MySQL ?

I tried

UPDATE db.tablename
  SET columnID = UUID()
  where columnID is not null

And just get every field the same

Answer 1

I’m not sure if it’s the easiest way, but it works. The idea is to create a trigger that does all work for you, then, to execute a query that updates your table, and finally to drop this trigger:

delimiter //
create trigger beforeYourTableUpdate  BEFORE UPDATE on YourTable
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
  SET new.guid_column := (SELECT UUID());
END
//

Then execute

UPDATE YourTable set guid_column = (SELECT UUID());

And DROP TRIGGER beforeYourTableUpdate;

UPDATE
Another solution that doesn’t use triggers, but requires primary key or unique index :

UPDATE YourTable,
INNER JOIN (SELECT unique_col, UUID() as new_id FROM YourTable) new_data 
ON (new_data.unique_col = YourTable.unique_col)
SET guid_column = new_data.new_id

UPDATE once again:
It seems that your original query should also work (maybe you don’t need WHERE columnID is not null, so all my fancy code is not needed.