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Difference between bulk update with FROM VALUES and without it?

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#1,055 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
postgresql, python
Domain
databases

Research direction

Start with asyncpg's executemany entry point and PostgreSQL's UPDATE ... FROM VALUES semantics, comparing both SQL examples and their request behavior. Done would be a clear documented explanation of whether the approaches differ in performance or purpose, and when the second form is useful.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

await conn.executemany(
    """
    UPDATE user SET login=$2, name=$3, age=$4, sex=$5
    WHERE id=$1
    """,
    users,
)
await conn.executemany(
    """
    UPDATE user SET login=actual_user.login, name=actual_user.name, age=actual_user.age, sex=actual_user.sex
    FROM (VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5)) AS actual_user (id, login, name, age::integer, sex::integer)
    WHERE user.id=actual_user.id
    """,
    users,
)

The first is cleaner. But I worry about performance. I know the second is performed as one request. But the first is the same?

Is there any reason to use the second way?

Dominant language
Python
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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