Clever. It will work, and it will do what the OP wanted. But it is not a clean solution.

this would not work if you did want to be able to set some fields to NULL

Right. And this is a good reason not to use this feature.

A second good reason to avoid this idiom is that it makes debugging more difficult. If all updates look the same, it will be harder to spot the offending one in a log file whan you're hunting for bugs.

A further good reason not to go for this solution is that you are straining the DBMS to encourage the programmer's laziness, and I am not talking of the Laziness that makes good coders.

It isn't difficult to create a query using only the fields that are needed. Why looking for trouble?

In reply to Re: Re: How to get a placeholder to keep the current column value? by Anonymous Monk
in thread How to get a placeholder to keep the current column value? by liz

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