Waiting for 9.5 – Add support for INSERT … ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING/UPDATE.

On 8th of May, Andres Freund committed patch:

Add support for INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING/UPDATE.
 
The newly added ON CONFLICT clause allows to specify an alternative to
raising a unique or exclusion constraint violation error when inserting.
ON CONFLICT refers to constraints that can either be specified using a
inference clause (by specifying the columns of a unique constraint) or
by naming a unique or exclusion constraint.  DO NOTHING avoids the
constraint violation, without touching the pre-existing row.  DO UPDATE
SET ... [WHERE ...] updates the pre-existing tuple, and has access to
both the tuple proposed for insertion and the existing tuple; the
optional WHERE clause can be used to prevent an update from being
executed.  The UPDATE SET and WHERE clauses have access to the tuple
proposed for insertion using the "magic" EXCLUDED alias, and to the
pre-existing tuple using the table name or its alias.
 
This feature is often referred to as upsert.
 
This is implemented using a new infrastructure called "speculative
insertion". It is an optimistic variant of regular insertion that first
does a pre-check for existing tuples and then attempts an insert.  If a
violating tuple was inserted concurrently, the speculatively inserted
tuple is deleted and a new attempt is made.  If the pre-check finds a
matching tuple the alternative DO NOTHING or DO UPDATE action is taken.
If the insertion succeeds without detecting a conflict, the tuple is
deemed inserted.
 
To handle the possible ambiguity between the excluded alias and a table
named excluded, and for convenience with long relation names, INSERT
INTO now can alias its target table.
 
Bumps catversion as stored rules change.
 
Author: Peter Geoghegan, with significant contributions from Heikki
    Linnakangas and Andres Freund. Testing infrastructure by Jeff Janes.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
    Dean Rasheed, Stephen Frost and many others.

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Waiting for 8.5 – exclusion constraints

On 7th of December, Tom Lane committed patch by Jeff Davis that adds general exclusion constraints:

Log Message:
-----------
Add exclusion constraints, which generalize the concept of uniqueness to
support any indexable commutative operator, not just equality.  Two rows
violate the exclusion constraint if "row1.col OP row2.col" is TRUE for
each of the columns in the constraint.
 
Jeff Davis, reviewed by Robert Haas

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