This is even farther off-topic, but I thought you might like to hear
it. IBM and Oracle have proposed (and SQL4 has accepted) a new DML
operation, the 'MERGE' statement, that combines the typical 'update or
insert' functionality into a single call. It has a bit more
generality as well:
From: Serge Rielau (srielau@ca.ibm.com)
Subject: Re: Efficiency; advanced/future SQL constructs
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory, comp.databases.ms-sqlserver
View: Complete Thread (20 articles) | Original Format
Date: 2001-08-24 05:11:00 PST
> 1. For each record, do a SELECT to find an existing record, > and
update on success, insert on failure. This is called a MERGE
statement. The paper was submitted jointly by Oracle and
IBM and has been accepted for SQL4.
MERGE, in its full form will be more general than what you describe.
It will
e.g. also support DELETE ("If I didn't see the product in my
inventory, yank it
from the product list")
oracle
9i has it already. DB2 does not yet, from what I can digest of
the IBM documentation. Postgres supporting this could be very cool.
Anyhow, that's the best-smelling revision in SQL4. Most everything
else are extensions to take us back^H^H^H^Hforward into the
1960^H^H90's with network^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hobject model databases. Yippee.
