Re: Allow ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE to return EXCLUDED values

(I realised I created a new thread by mistake, hopefully now I’ll get things back into the main one)

On 7 Oct 2025 at 23:52 +0200, Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com>, wrote:

On Tue, 7 Oct 2025 at 14:56, Viktor Holmberg <v@viktorh.net> wrote:

I’ve looked through this patch. As far as I can tell, everything looks good, working and well commented.

The only nitpick I could find is a mispelling "EXLCUDED" → "EXCLUDED" in src/test/regress/expected/returning.out:464.

Thanks for looking. I'm also glad to see that you picked up the INSERT

... ON CONFLICT DO SELECT patch, because I think these 2 features

should work well together. I'll take another look at that one, but I'm

not going to have any time this week.

Agree. It’d be great if you could have a look, but no rush - I’m going on holiday now for a week anyway.

A maybe bigger question, is it nice that EXCLUDED is null when no conflict occurred? I can see the logic, but I think ergonomics wise it’d be nicer to have the proposed values in EXCLUDED, no matter what happened later. Then one can check EXCLUDED.value = NEW.value to see if one’s changes were added, for example.

Hmm, I'm not sure. I think it would be counter-intuitive to have

non-null EXCLUDED values for rows that weren't excluded, and I think

it's just as easy to check what values were added either way.

I see the point - I guess I think about EXCLUDED more as “PROPOSED”. I don’t have any examples at hand that would substantiate my point of view so it’s not a strong objection. In my opinion this patch adds value regardless, and you’re right that adapting the code to either case isn’t a big deal.