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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

INSERT statement

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCore term

In software engineering, INSERT statement means: The SQL statement that adds one or more new rows to a table, using INSERT INTO followed by the column names and their values.

In Turkish: INSERT komutu, ekleme komutu

How it is used

People say 'insert a row', 'run an INSERT', 'bulk insert' and 'batch inserts'. For large data loads, many rows in one statement or tools like COPY (PostgreSQL) or BULK INSERT (SQL Server) are much faster than inserting rows one by one.

Example sentences

  1. The INSERT statement failed because the email column has a unique constraint.

  2. Combine those 10,000 single-row INSERT statements into a few batch inserts.

Common collocations

  • run an INSERT statement
  • insert a row
  • bulk insert
  • batch insert
  • INSERT INTO
  • UPDATE statementThe SQL statement that changes values in rows that already exist, usually limited by a WHERE clause so that only the right rows are changed.
  • DELETE statementThe SQL statement that removes rows from a table. With a WHERE clause it removes only matching rows; without one it removes every row.
  • upsertTo insert a row if it does not exist yet, or update it if it already does, in a single operation. The word combines 'update' and 'insert'.
  • DMLData manipulation language: the SQL statements that work with the data inside tables, mainly INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and often SELECT.
  • CRUDCreate, Read, Update, Delete: the four basic operations on stored data, matching the SQL statements INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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