MySQL INSERT IGNORE

The MySQL INSERT IGNORE statement is used to insert new records into a table. If the new record has a duplicate key value that conflicts with an existing record in the table, the INSERT IGNORE statement will simply ignore the new record, and the existing record will not be updated or modified. This can be useful when you want to insert new records without triggering an error for duplicate key violations.

The basic syntax of the INSERT IGNORE statement is as follows:

INSERT IGNORE INTO table_name (column1, column2, ...)
VALUES (value1, value2, ...);

Here’s a breakdown of each part of the statement:

• table_name: This is the name of the table into which you want to insert data.
• (column1, column2, ...): You specify the columns into which you want to insert data in the table.
• VALUES (value1, value2, ...): You provide the values you want to insert into the specified columns.

Here’s an example of how to use the INSERT IGNORE statement:

Suppose you have a table called students with a unique constraint on the student_id column. You want to insert a new student record, and if a record with the same student_id already exists, you want to ignore the new record and keep the existing record intact.

INSERT IGNORE INTO students (student_id, first_name, last_name, age)
VALUES (101, 'John', 'Doe', 20);

In this example, if a record with student_id 101 already exists, the INSERT IGNORE statement will not raise an error, and the new record will be ignored. If no duplicate key violation occurs, a new record will be inserted.

Keep in mind that while INSERT IGNORE can be useful for avoiding errors due to duplicate key violations, it doesn’t provide any feedback on whether the insert operation was successful or not. If you need to know whether an insert operation resulted in an update or an insert, you might want to consider using the INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statement or other error handling techniques.