Wednesday 21 January 2015

Insert only unqiue rows in MySQL-reject duplicate rows silently without error

If you use INSERT IGNORE, then the row won't actually be inserted if it results in a duplicate key. But the statement won't generate an error. It generates a warning instead. These cases include:

  • Inserting a duplicate key in columns with PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE constraints.
  • Inserting a NULL into a column with a NOT NULL constraint.
  • Inserting a row to a partitioned table, but the values you insert don't map to a partition.
  • If you use REPLACE, MySQL actually does a DELETE followed by an INSERT internally, which has some unexpected side effects:

  • A new auto-increment ID is allocated.
  • Dependent rows with foreign keys may be deleted (if you use cascading foreign keys) or else prevent the REPLACE.
  • Triggers that fire on DELETE are executed unnecessarily.
  • Side effects are propagated to replication slaves too.

Both REPLACE and INSERT...ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE are non-standard, proprietary inventions specific to MySQL. ANSI SQL 2003 defines a MERGE statement that can solve the same need (and more), but MySQL does not support the MERGE statement.

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