Move along, nothing to read

So lately I've doing a variety of development that uses PostgreSQL. It's come a long way since I last used it a couple of years ago, esp. in the realm of performance. The auto-complete in the psql tool is also a very nice touch, I can get it confused occasionally, but the auto-complete in the similar mysql tool is far less advanced.

There is however one thing that still bugs me, and it's turned up in plenty of other places. This is the issue of INSERT IGNORE/REPLACE that MySQL supports, but PostgreSQL doesn't. The widely documented way to handle these is to used a stored procedure instead, but that has a major shortcoming: it can only insert a single value at a time. This is a major performance limitation, and also suffers concurrency issues. INSERT IGNORE and REPLACE handle multi-valued inserted much more gracefully.

INSERT IGNORE is defined as inserting a data tuple, and if the primary key already exists, that singular tuple is not applied to the table. REPLACE is defined as insert a data tuple, and if the primary key already exists, using the remaining data in the tuple to perform an UPDATE statement.

If anybody has got other ideas that make handling REPLACE and INSERT IGNORE in PostgreSQL easier, I'd love to hear them.