Re: Bulkloading using COPY - ignore duplicates?

> > Would this seem a reasonable thing to do? Does anyone rely on COPY
> > FROM causing an ERROR on duplicate input?
>
> Yes. This change will not be acceptable unless it's made an optional
> (and not default, IMHO, though perhaps that's negotiable) feature of
> COPY.
>
> The implementation might be rather messy too. I don't much
> care for the
> notion of a routine as low-level as bt_check_unique knowing that the
> context is or is not COPY. We might have to do some restructuring.
>
> > Would:
> > WITH ON_DUPLICATE = CONTINUE|TERMINATE (or similar)
> > need to be added to the COPY command (I hope not)?
>
> It occurs to me that skip-the-insert might be a useful option for
> INSERTs that detect a unique-key conflict, not only for COPY. (Cf.
> the regular discussions we see on whether to do INSERT first or
> UPDATE first when the key might already exist.) Maybe a SET variable
> that applies to all forms of insertion would be appropriate.

Imho yes, but:
I thought that the problem was, that you cannot simply skip the
insert, because at that time the tuple (pointer) might have already
been successfully inserted into an other index/heap, and thus this was
only sanely possible with savepoints/undo.

An idea would probably be to at once mark the new tuple dead, and
proceed
normally?

Andreas