Update multiple rows with different values in a single SQL query

There’s a couple of ways to accomplish this decently efficiently.

First –
If possible, you can do some sort of bulk insert to a temporary table. This depends somewhat on your RDBMS/host language, but at worst this can be accomplished with a simple dynamic SQL (using a VALUES() clause), and then a standard update-from-another-table. Most systems provide utilities for bulk load, though

Second –
And this is somewhat RDBMS dependent as well, you could construct a dynamic update statement. In this case, where the VALUES(...) clause inside the CTE has been created on-the-fly:

WITH Tmp(id, px, py) AS (VALUES(id1, newsPosX1, newPosY1), 
                               (id2, newsPosX2, newPosY2),
                               ......................... ,
                               (idN, newsPosXN, newPosYN))

UPDATE TableToUpdate SET posX = (SELECT px
                                 FROM Tmp
                                 WHERE TableToUpdate.id = Tmp.id),
                         posY = (SELECT py
                                 FROM Tmp
                                 WHERE TableToUpdate.id = Tmp.id)


WHERE id IN (SELECT id
             FROM Tmp)

(According to the documentation, this should be valid SQLite syntax, but I can’t get it to work in a fiddle)

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