At 12:28 AM 11/2/2005 -0500, Jan Wieck wrote:
>Using REPLACE INTO at one place and creating duplicates on purpose in
>another seems to make zero sense to me. Until one can explain the reason
>for that to me, I claim that a UNIQUE constraint on such key is a logical
>consequence.
I believe it is better to tell people to use UNIQUE constraints to avoid
duplicates than to tell them to use a particular stored procedure. I was
just pointing out that the "magic" wasn't really in the stored procedure.
Especially since that particular stored procedure does not generalize
easily - you have to change it to use it on another table. Users might make
mistakes of using the procedure on a table without a uniqueness constraint
in the right fields, or the wrong uniqueness constraint (e.g. different
collation from the one they use in a select).
Whereas if they had a REPLACE/PUT/MERGE with similar syntax as an UPDATE,
that is less likely to increase the possibility of errors.
Regards,
Link.