I’m trying to understand how the ON CONFLICT clause works. What I want, is if an insert fails for any reason, I want it to do nothing with the row, but continue processing the other items in the bulk insert.
Here’s my scenario. I’m building a bulk insert query, with 1000 rows to be inserted. Currently, my query has:
INSERT INTO table (...,...,...) VALUES (...,...,...),(...,null..,...), (998 more) ON CONFLICT ON CONSTRAINT primary_key DO NOTHING
What I want to know is can I do this:
INSERT INTO table (...,...,...) VALUES (...,...,...),(...,null..,...), (998 more) ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING
This would effectively take any conflict inserting a row (in my case a null constraint on a column) and just not insert it. I need to ensure that if there is 1 conflict for one row, that the other 999 rows will still be inserted.
UPDATE: here’s a demo showing the issue I’m encountering: https://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=postgres_9.5&fiddle=8947dbcd38e9136531b907d3c745c0f5
UPDATE 2: It looks like when you pass null values, it fails the entire bulk insert process.
FINAL UPDATE: Accepted the first answer because of that cool demo link – which helped me realize (and in the comments) that null isn’t captured, so I just need to change my table structure and rely on the primary key… so when duplicate nulls are added, the pkey constraint gets triggered. Thanks everyone!
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Answer
All rows for which there is no conflict will be inserted, and the conflicting row will be ignored.
Consider this demo:
-- create the table and insert a record with id 1 create table t (id int primary key, info text); insert into t values (1, 'old'); -- 1 rows affected -- attempt to insert 5 'new' records with ids 1 .. 5 insert into t select n, 'new' from generate_series(1, 5) as n(n) on conflict do nothing; -- 4 rows affected -- check the results select * from t;
id | info -: | :--- 1 | old 2 | new 3 | new 4 | new 5 | new