Personally, I wouldn't bother with having a "most accurate" SQL, as most databases need to rewrite the whole row anyway.

my $dbquery eq "UPDATE table_name SET column_name=$inputUpdate[0] WHERE column_name=$input[1]";

doesn't do what you think it does, so it might help if you showed us the actual error message that Perl tells you.

If you're bent on providing a "most accurate" SQL statement, most likely the following code can give you such a statement:

use strict;
my @columns = qw(name title state);
my @input = qw(foo bar baz);
my @inputUpdate = qw(boing bar boo);

my $table_name = 'mytable';

my @new_value_clause = map { "$columns[$_] = ?" } grep { $input[$_] ne
+ $inputUpdate[$_] } 0..$#inputUpdate;
my @where_clause     = map { "$columns[$_] = ?" } 0..$#input;

my $sql = join "\n",
         "UPDATE $table_name",
         "SET " . join ",", @new_value_clause,
         "WHERE " . join " and ", @where_clause;

my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
$dbh->execute(@inputUpdate, @input);

[download]

In reply to Re: Best way to check which field(s) was changed by Corion
in thread Best way to check which field(s) was changed by josh097

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