Re: Allow ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE to return EXCLUDED values

On Tue, 7 Oct 2025 at 14:56, Viktor Holmberg <v@viktorh.net> wrote:

I’ve looked through this patch. As far as I can tell, everything looks good, working and well commented.
The only nitpick I could find is a mispelling "EXLCUDED" → "EXCLUDED" in src/test/regress/expected/returning.out:464.

Thanks for looking. I'm also glad to see that you picked up the INSERT
... ON CONFLICT DO SELECT patch, because I think these 2 features
should work well together. I'll take another look at that one, but I'm
not going to have any time this week.

A maybe bigger question, is it nice that EXCLUDED is null when no conflict occurred? I can see the logic, but I think ergonomics wise it’d be nicer to have the proposed values in EXCLUDED, no matter what happened later. Then one can check EXCLUDED.value = NEW.value to see if one’s changes were added, for example.

Hmm, I'm not sure. I think it would be counter-intuitive to have
non-null EXCLUDED values for rows that weren't excluded, and I think
it's just as easy to check what values were added either way.

Regards,
Dean

On 07/10/2025 23:52, Dean Rasheed wrote:

On Tue, 7 Oct 2025 at 14:56, Viktor Holmberg <v@viktorh.net> wrote:

A maybe bigger question, is it nice that EXCLUDED is null when no conflict occurred? I can see the logic, but I think ergonomics wise it’d be nicer to have the proposed values in EXCLUDED, no matter what happened later. Then one can check EXCLUDED.value = NEW.value to see if one’s changes were added, for example.

Hmm, I'm not sure. I think it would be counter-intuitive to have
non-null EXCLUDED values for rows that weren't excluded, and I think
it's just as easy to check what values were added either way.

Agreed.  EXCLUDED should be null or even inaccessible if the row wasn't
excluded.

--

Vik Fearing