row-level trigger vs statement-level trigger

Question

I am having a hard time understanding the difference between \'row-level triggers\' and \'statement-level triggers\'.

From my understanding, in the scenario a stateme

Answer 1

You may want trigger action to execute once after the client executes a statement that modifies a million rows (statement-level trigger). Or, you may want to trigger the action once for every row that is modified (row-level trigger).

EXAMPLE: Let's say you have a trigger that will make sure all high school seniors graduate. That is, when a senior's grade is 12, and we increase it to 13, we want to set the grade to NULL.

For a statement level trigger, you'd say, after the increase-grade statement runs, check the whole table once to update any nows with grade 13 to NULL.

For a row-level trigger, you'd say, after every row that is updated, update the new row's grade to NULL if it is 13.

A statement-level trigger would look like this:

create trigger stmt_level_trigger
after update on Highschooler
begin
    update Highschooler
    set grade = NULL
    where grade = 13;
end;

and a row-level trigger would look like this:

create trigger row_level_trigger
after update on Highschooler
for each row
when New.grade = 13
begin
    update Highschooler
    set grade = NULL
    where New.ID = Highschooler.ID;
end;

Note that SQLite doesn't support statement-level triggers, so in SQLite, the FOR EACH ROW is optional.