How to know if when using “on duplicate key update” a row was inserted or updated?

Question

We have a database that gets updated everyday at midnight with a cronjob, we get new data from an external XML.

What we do is that we insert all the new content and

Answer 1

Add an update_count INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 1 column and change your query:

INSERT
INTO    table (id, col1, col2, col3)
VALUES
(id_value, val1, val2, val3),
(id_value, val1, val2, val3,),
(id_value, val1, val2, val3),
(id_value, val1, val2, val3),
ON DUPLICATE KEY
UPDATE 
        col1 = VALUES (col1), 
        col2 = VALUES (col2), 
        col3 = VALUES (col3),
        update_count = update_count + 1;

You can also increment it in a BEFORE UPDATE trigger which will allow you to keep the query as is.