Question

MySQL has this incredibly useful yet proprietary REPLACE INTO SQL Command.

Can this easily be emulated in SQL Server 2005?

Starting a new Transaction, doing a Select() and then either UPDATE or INSERT and COMMIT is always a little bit of a pain, especially when doing it in the application and therefore always keeping 2 versions of the statement.

I wonder if there is an easy and universal way to implement such a function into SQL Server 2005?

Answer 1

This is something that annoys me about MSSQL (rant on my blog). I wish MSSQL supported upsert.

@Dillie-O’s code is a good way in older SQL versions (+1 vote), but it still is basically two IO operations (the exists and then the update or insert)

There’s a slightly better way on this post, basically:

--try an update update tablename  set field1 = 'new value',     field2 = 'different value',     ... where idfield = 7  --insert if failed if @@rowcount = 0 and @@error = 0     insert into tablename             ( idfield, field1, field2, ... )     values ( 7, 'value one', 'another value', ... ) 

This reduces it to one IO operations if it’s an update, or two if an insert.

MS Sql2008 introduces merge from the SQL:2003 standard:

merge tablename as target using (values ('new value', 'different value'))     as source (field1, field2)     on target.idfield = 7 when matched then     update     set field1 = source.field1,         field2 = source.field2,         ... when not matched then     insert ( idfield, field1, field2, ... )     values ( 7,  source.field1, source.field2, ... ) 

Now it’s really just one IO operation, but awful code 🙁