Message-ID: <404F810E.1010707@outputservices.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:56:46 -0700
From: Marty Scholes <marty@outputservices.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US;
	rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020920 Netscape/7.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: pgsql-sql <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Inserting data in a table using sub-selects]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

INSERT INTO table2 (id, content) (
    SELECT id, coalesce(title, '') || ' ' || coalesce(description, '')
    FROM table1 t1);

If you want to keep them syncrhonized, in other words, rerun the query
over and over again without having to truncate table2 first or deleting
all of the rows, you can:

INSERT INTO table2 (id, content) (
    SELECT id, coalesce(title, '') || ' ' || coalesce(description, '')
    FROM table1 t1)
WHERE id NOT IN (
    SELECT id
    FROM table1);

With Oracle there is a slick way to do a partial outer join that allowed
you to do this without creating a complete list of table1.id in the last
subquery, but I dunno if Pg has an equivalent mechanism.


Andreas Joseph Krogh wrote:
 > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
 > Hash: SHA1
 >
 > Hi, I'd like to fill one table with the contents of another table. 
Mye schema
 > is like this:
 >
 > CREATE TABLE table1(
 > id serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
 > title varchar NOT NULL,
 > description varchar
 > );
 >
 > CREATE TABLE table2(
 > id int NOT NULL REFERENCES(table1(id) ON DELETE CASCADE,
 > content varchar NOT NULL
 > );
 >
 > Now - is there a way I can do something like:
 > INSERT INTO table2(id, content) values (select t1.id, 
coalesce(t1.title, '')
 > || ' ' || coalesce(t1.description, '') as content from table1 t1);
 >
 > Any hints on how to insert a lot of values at the same time like this?
 >
 > - --
 > Andreas Joseph Krogh <andreak@officenet.no>
 > Managing Director, Senior Software Developer
 > OfficeNet AS
 >
 > I always do a CVS update before making a patch (unless I forget).
 >
 > gpg public_key: http://dev.officenet.no/~andreak/public_key.asc
 > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
 > Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
 >
 > iD8DBQFAT3H1UopImDh2gfQRAsa6AJ9jZjNz25w4iVnxNJYY9LJuG0HBLACfZfup
 > 1TMzQSi1+YYgNjpcampX6wo=
 > =fJA3
 > -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
 >
 > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
 > TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings