On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 11:00 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Perhaps the way to resolve Peter's objection is to make the syntax > more fully like UPDATE: > > INSERT INTO target SET c1 = x, c2 = y+z, ... FROM tables-providing-x-y-z > > (with the patch as-submitted corresponding to the case with an empty > FROM clause, hence no variables in the expressions-to-be-assigned). > > Of course, this is not functionally distinct from > > INSERT INTO target(c1,c2,...) SELECT x, y+z, ... FROM tables-providing-x-y-z > > and it's fair to question whether it's worth supporting a nonstandard > syntax just to allow the target column names to be written closer to > the expressions-to-be-assigned.
For what it's worth, I think this would be useful enough to justify its existence. Back in days of yore when dragons roamed the earth and I wrote database-driven applications instead of hacking on the database itself, I often wondered why I had to write two completely-different looking SQL statements, one to insert the data which a user had entered into a webform into the database, and another to update previously-entered data. This feature would allow those queries to be written in the same way, which would have pleased me, back in the day.
I still do, and this would be a big help. I don't care if it's non-standard.
