Duplicate / Copy records in the same MySQL table

Question

I have been looking for a while now but I can not find an easy solution for my problem. I would like to duplicate a record in a table, but of course, the unique primary key

Answer 1

Alex's answer needs some care (e.g. locking or a transaction) in multi-client environments.

Assuming the AUTO ID field is the first one in the table (a usual case), we can make use of implicit transactions.

    CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE tmp SELECT * from invoices WHERE ...;
    ALTER TABLE tmp drop ID; # drop autoincrement field
    # UPDATE tmp SET ...; # just needed to change other unique keys
    INSERT INTO invoices SELECT 0,tmp.* FROM tmp;
    DROP TABLE tmp;

From the MySQL docs:

Using AUTO_INCREMENT: You can also explicitly assign NULL or 0 to the column to generate sequence numbers.

Answer 2

I have a similar issue, and this is what I'm doing:

insert into Preguntas  (`EncuestaID`, `Tipo` , `Seccion` , `RespuestaID` , `Texto` )  select '23', `Tipo`, `Seccion`, `RespuestaID`, `Texto` from Preguntas where `EncuestaID`= 18

Been Preguntas:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `Preguntas` (
  `ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `EncuestaID` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `Tipo` char(5) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `Seccion` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `RespuestaID` bigint(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `Texto` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci ,
  PRIMARY KEY (`ID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=522 ;

So, the ID is automatically incremented and also I'm using a fixed value ('23') for EncuestaID.

Answer 3

I needed this as well; my solution was to use SQLYOG (free version) to export the desired record as SQL (creates an insert).

I then hand edited this to remove the id as this needs to be auto-generated and then copied the insert into SQLYog to execute it. This was painless. I guess plenty of other MySQL GUIs can do this as well.

This provides me with a record I can use for test purposes on a live system.

I now have this insert for reuse as well, as the table is rewritten daily.