REPLACE
Syntax
Or:
REPLACE [LOW_PRIORITY | DELAYED] [INTO]tbl_name
[PARTITION (partition_name
,...)] SETcol_name
={expr
| DEFAULT}, ...
Or:
REPLACE [LOW_PRIORITY | DELAYED] [INTO]tbl_name
[PARTITION (partition_name
,...)] [(col_name
,...)] SELECT ...
REPLACE
works exactly like INSERT
, except that if an old row in the table has the same value as a new row for a PRIMARY KEY
or a UNIQUE
index, the old row is deleted before the new row is inserted. See , "INSERT
Syntax".
REPLACE
is a MariaDB extension to the SQL standard. It either inserts, or deletes and inserts. For another MariaDB extension to standard SQL-that either inserts or updates-see , "INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
Syntax".
Note that unless the table has a PRIMARY KEY
or UNIQUE
index, using a REPLACE
statement makes no sense. It becomes equivalent to INSERT
, because there is no index to be used to determine whether a new row duplicates another.
Values for all columns are taken from the values specified in the REPLACE
statement. Any missing columns are set to their default values, just as happens for INSERT
. You cannot refer to values from the current row and use them in the new row. If you use an assignment such as SET
, the reference to the column name on the right hand side is treated as col_name
= col_name
+ 1DEFAULT(
, so the assignment is equivalent to col_name
)SET
.
col_name
= DEFAULT(col_name
) + 1
To use REPLACE
, you must have both the INSERT
and DELETE
privileges for the table.
Beginning with MariaDB 5.6.2, REPLACE
supports explicit partition selection using the PARTITION
option with a comma-separated list of names of partitions, subpartitions, or both. As with INSERT
, if it is not possible to insert the new row into any of these partitions or subpartitions, the REPLACE
statement fails with the error Found a row not matching the given partition set. See , "Partition Selection", for more information.
The REPLACE
statement returns a count to indicate the number of rows affected. This is the sum of the rows deleted and inserted. If the count is 1 for a single-row REPLACE
, a row was inserted and no rows were deleted. If the count is greater than 1, one or more old rows were deleted before the new row was inserted. It is possible for a single row to replace more than one old row if the table contains multiple unique indexes and the new row duplicates values for different old rows in different unique indexes.
The affected-rows count makes it easy to determine whether REPLACE
only added a row or whether it also replaced any rows: Check whether the count is 1 (added) or greater (replaced).
If you are using the C API, the affected-rows count can be obtained using the mysql_affected_rows()
function.
Currently, you cannot replace into a table and select from the same table in a subquery.
MySQL uses the following algorithm for REPLACE
(and LOAD DATA ... REPLACE
):
- Try to insert the new row into the table
- While the insertion fails because a duplicate-key error occurs for a primary key or unique index:
- Delete from the table the conflicting row that has the duplicate key value
- Try again to insert the new row into the table
It is possible that in the case of a duplicate-key error, a storage engine may perform the REPLACE
as an update rather than a delete plus insert, but the semantics are the same. There are no user-visible effects other than a possible difference in how the storage engine increments Handler_
status variables.
xxx
Because the results of REPLACE ... SELECT
statements depend on the ordering of rows from the SELECT
and this order cannot always be guaranteed, it is possible when logging these statements for the master and the slave to diverge. For this reason, in MariaDB 5.6.4 and later, REPLACE ... SELECT
statements are flagged as unsafe for statement-based replication. With this change, such statements produce a warning in the log when using the STATEMENT
binary logging mode, and are logged using the row-based format when using MIXED
mode. See also , "Advantages and Disadvantages of Statement-Based and Row-Based Replication".