SQLite - UPSERT *not* INSERT or REPLACE

Question

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsert

Insert Update stored proc on SQL Server

Is there some clever way to do this in SQLite that I have not thought of?

Answer 1

Eric B’s answer is OK if you want to preserve just one or maybe two columns from the existing row. If you want to preserve a lot of columns, it gets too cumbersome fast.

Here’s an approach that will scale well to any amount of columns on either side. To illustrate it I will assume the following schema:

 CREATE TABLE page (
     id      INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
     name    TEXT UNIQUE,
     title   TEXT,
     content TEXT,
     author  INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES user (id),
     ts      TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
 );

Note in particular that name is the natural key of the row – id is used only for foreign keys, so the point is for SQLite to pick the ID value itself when inserting a new row. But when updating an existing row based on its name, I want it to continue to have the old ID value (obviously!).

I achieve a true UPSERT with the following construct:

 WITH new (name, title, author) AS ( VALUES('about', 'About this site', 42) )
 INSERT OR REPLACE INTO page (id, name, title, content, author)
 SELECT old.id, new.name, new.title, old.content, new.author
 FROM new LEFT JOIN page AS old ON new.name = old.name;

The exact form of this query can vary a bit. The key is the use of INSERT SELECT with a left outer join, to join an existing row to the new values.

Here, if a row did not previously exist, old.id will be NULL and SQLite will then assign an ID automatically, but if there already was such a row, old.id will have an actual value and this will be reused. Which is exactly what I wanted.

In fact this is very flexible. Note how the ts column is completely missing on all sides – because it has a DEFAULT value, SQLite will just do the right thing in any case, so I don’t have to take care of it myself.

You can also include a column on both the new and old sides and then use e.g. COALESCE(new.content, old.content) in the outer SELECT to say “insert the new content if there was any, otherwise keep the old content” – e.g. if you are using a fixed query and are binding the new values with placeholders.