Re: Bulkloading using COPY - ignore duplicates?

Lee Kindness <lkindness@csl.co.uk>

From: Lee Kindness <lkindness@csl.co.uk>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Cc: Lee Kindness <lkindness@csl.co.uk>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Jim Buttafuoco <jim@buttafuoco.net>, <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2001-12-14T11:30:17Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Peter Eisentraut writes:
 > I think allowing this feature would open up a world of new
 > dangerous ideas, such as ignoring check contraints or foreign keys
 > or magically massaging other tables so that the foreign keys are
 > satisfied, or ignoring default values, or whatever.  The next step
 > would then be allowing the same optimizations in INSERT.  I feel
 > COPY should load the data and that's it.  If you don't like the
 > data you have then you have to fix it first.

I agree that PostgreSQL's checks during COPY are a bonus and I
wouldn't dream of not having them. Many database systems provide a
fast bulkload by ignoring these constraits and cross references -
that's a tricky/horrid situation.

However I suppose the question is should such 'invalid data' abort the
transaction, it seems a bit drastic...

I suppose i'm not really after a IGNORE DUPLICATES option, but rather
a CONTINUE ON ERROR kind of thing.

Regards, Lee.