Tip: Supress Errors When Duplicate Data Is Inserted in MySQL

See how to use INSERT IGNORE in MySQL for cases in which ignoring duplicates might be useful.

by Sridhar MS

Mar 6, 2018

There are times in which we need to suppress some errors that are not impacting what we currently are working on.

In MySQL, we may want to suppress an error that is caused by duplicate data insertion with INSERT IGNORE.

Code snippet:

CREATE TABLE `EMPLOYEE` (
   `FIRSTNAME` VARCHAR(25) NOT NULL,
   `LASTNAME` VARCHAR(25) NOT NULL,
   PRIMARY KEY (FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME)
);

INSERT IGNORE INTO EMPLOYEE (FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME) VALUES( 'Ray', 'Neil');

Expected result:

-- First time insertion
INSERT IGNORE INTO EMPLOYEE (FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME) VALUES( 'Ray', 'Neil');
/* Affected rows: 1  Found rows: 0  Warnings: 0  Duration for 1 query: 0.016 sec. */

-- Subsequent insertion
INSERT IGNORE INTO EMPLOYEE (FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME) VALUES( 'Ray', 'Neil');
/* Affected rows: 0  Found rows: 0  Warnings: 0  Duration for 1 query: 0.000 sec. */

Visit the DevX Tip Bank