Use INSERT IGNORE INTO table
.
There’s also INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
syntax, and you can find explanations in 13.2.6.2 INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE Statement.
Post from bogdan.org.ua according to Google’s webcache:
18th October 2007
To start: as of the latest MySQL, syntax presented in the title is not
possible. But there are several very easy ways to accomplish what is
expected using existing functionality.There are 3 possible solutions: using INSERT IGNORE, REPLACE, or
INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE.Imagine we have a table:
CREATE TABLE `transcripts` ( `ensembl_transcript_id` varchar(20) NOT NULL, `transcript_chrom_start` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `transcript_chrom_end` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`ensembl_transcript_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
Now imagine that we have an automatic pipeline importing transcripts
meta-data from Ensembl, and that due to various reasons the pipeline
might be broken at any step of execution. Thus, we need to ensure two
things:
- repeated executions of the pipeline will not destroy our
> database
- repeated executions will not die due to ‘duplicate
> primary key’ errors.Method 1: using REPLACE
It’s very simple:
REPLACE INTO `transcripts` SET `ensembl_transcript_id` = 'ENSORGT00000000001', `transcript_chrom_start` = 12345, `transcript_chrom_end` = 12678;
If the record exists, it will be overwritten; if it does not yet
exist, it will be created. However, using this method isn’t efficient
for our case: we do not need to overwrite existing records, it’s fine
just to skip them.Method 2: using INSERT IGNORE Also very simple:
INSERT IGNORE INTO `transcripts` SET `ensembl_transcript_id` = 'ENSORGT00000000001', `transcript_chrom_start` = 12345, `transcript_chrom_end` = 12678;
Here, if the ‘ensembl_transcript_id’ is already present in the
database, it will be silently skipped (ignored). (To be more precise,
here’s a quote from MySQL reference manual: “If you use the IGNORE
keyword, errors that occur while executing the INSERT statement are
treated as warnings instead. For example, without IGNORE, a row that
duplicates an existing UNIQUE index or PRIMARY KEY value in the table
causes a duplicate-key error and the statement is aborted.”.) If the
record doesn’t yet exist, it will be created.This second method has several potential weaknesses, including
non-abortion of the query in case any other problem occurs (see the
manual). Thus it should be used if previously tested without the
IGNORE keyword.Method 3: using INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE:
Third option is to use
INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
syntax, and in the UPDATE part just do nothing do some meaningless
(empty) operation, like calculating 0+0 (Geoffray suggests doing the
id=id assignment for the MySQL optimization engine to ignore this
operation). Advantage of this method is that it only ignores duplicate
key events, and still aborts on other errors.As a final notice: this post was inspired by Xaprb. I’d also advise to
consult his other post on writing flexible SQL queries.