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Recently on a project it became necessary to copy data from one database table to another, identical table. The theory is that once data is data, it is data forever. Meaning this; Just because it isn’t useful information at the moment doesn’t necessarily mean that it will always be useless. Long story short, if you have data… Keep it.

Of course it is possible to just SELECT the data from table_1, INSERT it into table_2 then DELETE the original record from table_1, but why do that when MySQL has built in a shortcut? Enter, the INSERT/SELECT hybrid query.

INSERT INTO table_2
SELECT * FROM table_1 t1
WHERE ( t1.id_field = 'some_unique_id' );

After that, just follow it up with a standard DELETE query to remove the original record.

DELETE FROM table_1
WHERE ( id = 'some_unique_id' );

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 12:21 am and is filed under PHP Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.