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MySQL | UPDATE

schedule Aug 12, 2023
Last updated
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MySQL
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The UPDATE statement is used to modify existing records in a table.

WARNING

You need the UPDATE privilege on columns whose values you wish to update.

Syntax

UPDATE table_name
SET column1 = value1, column2 = value2 ...
WHERE condition;

Examples

Consider the following table about whether some students hold a drivers license or not:

student_id

full_name

age

has_license

1

Sky Towner

17

0

2

Ben Davis

19

1

3

Travis Apple

18

0

4

Arthur David

16

0

5

Benjamin Town

17

1

The above sample table can be created using the code here.

Single column update

To update Sky Towner's age to 18 as today is his birthday:

UPDATE drivers_license
SET age = 18
WHERE student_id = 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

The WHERE clause here specifies that we only want to update the age for Sky Towner.

We can see that Sky Towner's age is now updated to 18:

SELECT *
FROM drivers_license;
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| student_id | full_name | age | has_license |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| 1 | Sky Towner | 18 | 0 |
| 2 | Ben Davis | 19 | 1 |
| 3 | Travis Apple | 18 | 0 |
| 4 | Arthur David | 16 | 0 |
| 5 | Benjamin Town | 17 | 1 |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
WARNING

Take care whenever you are performing an update on your table. If we forget to add the WHERE clause in the above example, the age for all students in the table will be set to 18.

To set the age of all students to 18:

UPDATE drivers_license
SET age = 18;
SELECT *
FROM drivers_license;
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| student_id | full_name | age | has_license |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| 1 | Sky Towner | 18 | 0 |
| 2 | Ben Davis | 18 | 1 |
| 3 | Travis Apple | 18 | 0 |
| 4 | Arthur David | 18 | 0 |
| 5 | Benjamin Town | 18 | 1 |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+

Multiple column update

To update the age and has_license column values for student_id=1:

UPDATE drivers_license
SET age = 18, has_license = TRUE
WHERE student_id = 1;
SELECT *
FROM drivers_license;
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| student_id | full_name | age | has_license |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| 1 | Sky Towner | 18 | 1 |
| 2 | Ben Davis | 19 | 1 |
| 3 | Travis Apple | 18 | 0 |
| 4 | Arthur David | 16 | 0 |
| 5 | Benjamin Town | 17 | 1 |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+

As demonstrated above, multiple column updates are performed by specifying comma separated column=value pairs.

Update with respect to current value

To update the age of student 1 by incrementing the current value by 1:

UPDATE drivers_license
SET age = age + 1WHERE student_id = 1;
SELECT *
FROM drivers_license;
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| student_id | full_name | age | has_license |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+
| 1 | Sky Towner | 18 | 0 |
| 2 | Ben Davis | 19 | 1 |
| 3 | Travis Apple | 18 | 0 |
| 4 | Arthur David | 16 | 0 |
| 5 | Benjamin Town | 17 | 1 |
+------------+---------------+------+-------------+

Note that Sky Towner's age has been incremented by 1 from 17 to 18.

robocat
Published by Arthur Yanagisawa
Edited by 0 others
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