PostgreSQL 8.0.3 Documentation
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# 35.6. Basic Statements

In this section and the following ones, we describe all the statement types that are explicitly understood by PL/pgSQL. Anything not recognized as one of these statement types is presumed to be an SQL command and is sent to the main database engine to execute (after substitution of any PL/pgSQL variables used in the statement). Thus, for example, the SQL commands `INSERT`, `UPDATE`, and `DELETE` may be considered to be statements of PL/pgSQL, but they are not specifically listed here.

## 35.6.1. Assignment

An assignment of a value to a variable or row/record field is written as:

    identifier := expression;

As explained above, the expression in such a statement is evaluated by means of an SQL `SELECT` command sent to the main database engine. The expression must yield a single value.

If the expression's result data type doesn't match the variable's data type, or the variable has a specific size/precision (like `char(20)`), the result value will be implicitly converted by the PL/pgSQL interpreter using the result type's output-function and the variable type's input-function. Note that this could potentially result in run-time errors generated by the input function, if the string form of the result value is not acceptable to the input function.

Examples:

    user_id := 20;
    tax := subtotal * 0.06;

## 35.6.2. `SELECT INTO`

The result of a `SELECT` command yielding multiple columns (but only one row) can be assigned to a record variable, row-type variable, or list of scalar variables. This is done by:

    SELECT INTO target select_expressions FROM ...;

where `target` can be a record variable, a row variable, or a comma-separated list of simple variables and record/row fields. The `select_expressions` and the remainder of the command are the same as in regular SQL.

Note that this is quite different from PostgreSQL's normal interpretation of `SELECT INTO`, where the `INTO` target is a newly created table. If you want to create a table from a `SELECT` result inside a PL/pgSQL function, use the syntax `CREATE TABLE ... AS SELECT`.

If a row or a variable list is used as target, the selected values must exactly match the structure of the target, or a run-time error occurs. When a record variable is the target, it automatically configures itself to the row type of the query result columns.

Except for the `INTO` clause, the `SELECT` statement is the same as a normal SQL `SELECT` command and can use its full power.

The `INTO` clause can appear almost anywhere in the `SELECT` statement. Customarily it is written either just after `SELECT` as shown above, or just before `FROM` — that is, either just before or just after the list of `select_expressions`.

If the query returns zero rows, null values are assigned to the target(s). If the query returns multiple rows, the first row is assigned to the target(s) and the rest are discarded. (Note that "the first row" is not well-defined unless you've used `ORDER BY`.)

You can check the special `FOUND` variable (see Section 35.6.6) after a `SELECT INTO` statement to determine whether the assignment was successful, that is, at least one row was was returned by the query. For example:

    SELECT INTO myrec * FROM emp WHERE empname = myname;
    IF NOT FOUND THEN
        RAISE EXCEPTION 'employee % not found', myname;
    END IF;

To test for whether a record/row result is null, you can use the `IS NULL` conditional. There is, however, no way to tell whether any additional rows might have been discarded. Here is an example that handles the case where no rows have been returned:

    DECLARE
        users_rec RECORD;
    BEGIN
        SELECT INTO users_rec * FROM users WHERE user_id=3;

        IF users_rec.homepage IS NULL THEN
            -- user entered no homepage, return "http://"
            RETURN 'http://';
        END IF;
    END;

## 35.6.3. Executing an Expression or Query With No Result

Sometimes one wishes to evaluate an expression or query but discard the result (typically because one is calling a function that has useful side-effects but no useful result value). To do this in PL/pgSQL, use the `PERFORM` statement:

    PERFORM query;

This executes `query` and discards the result. Write the `query` the same way as you would in an SQL `SELECT` command, but replace the initial keyword `SELECT` with `PERFORM`. PL/pgSQL variables will be substituted into the query as usual. Also, the special variable `FOUND` is set to true if the query produced at least one row or false if it produced no rows.

> Note: One might expect that `SELECT` with no `INTO` clause would accomplish this result, but at present the only accepted way to do it is `PERFORM`.

An example:

    PERFORM create_mv('cs_session_page_requests_mv', my_query);

## 35.6.4. Doing Nothing At All

Sometimes a placeholder statement that does nothing is useful. For example, it can indicate that one arm of an if/then/else chain is deliberately empty. For this purpose, use the `NULL` statement:

    NULL;

For example, the following two fragments of code are equivalent:

        BEGIN
            y := x / 0;
        EXCEPTION
            WHEN division_by_zero THEN
                NULL;  -- ignore the error
        END;

        BEGIN
            y := x / 0;
        EXCEPTION
            WHEN division_by_zero THEN  -- ignore the error
        END;

Which is preferable is a matter of taste.

> Note: In Oracle's PL/SQL, empty statement lists are not allowed, and so `NULL` statements are required for situations such as this. PL/pgSQL allows you to just write nothing, instead.

## 35.6.5. Executing Dynamic Commands

Oftentimes you will want to generate dynamic commands inside your PL/pgSQL functions, that is, commands that will involve different tables or different data types each time they are executed. PL/pgSQL's normal attempts to cache plans for commands will not work in such scenarios. To handle this sort of problem, the `EXECUTE` statement is provided:

    EXECUTE command-string;

where `command-string` is an expression yielding a string (of type `text`) containing the command to be executed. This string is fed literally to the SQL engine.

Note in particular that no substitution of PL/pgSQL variables is done on the command string. The values of variables must be inserted in the command string as it is constructed.

Unlike all other commands in PL/pgSQL, a command run by an `EXECUTE` statement is not prepared and saved just once during the life of the session. Instead, the command is prepared each time the statement is run. The command string can be dynamically created within the function to perform actions on different tables and columns.

The results from `SELECT` commands are discarded by `EXECUTE`, and `SELECT INTO` is not currently supported within `EXECUTE`. So there is no way to extract a result from a dynamically-created `SELECT` using the plain `EXECUTE` command. There are two other ways to do it, however: one is to use the `FOR-IN-EXECUTE` loop form described in Section 35.7.4, and the other is to use a cursor with `OPEN-FOR-EXECUTE`, as described in Section 35.8.2.

When working with dynamic commands you will often have to handle escaping of single quotes. The recommended method for quoting fixed text in your function body is dollar quoting. (If you have legacy code that does not use dollar quoting, please refer to the overview in Section 35.2.1, which can save you some effort when translating said code to a more reasonable scheme.)

Dynamic values that are to be inserted into the constructed query require special handling since they might themselves contain quote characters. An example (this assumes that you are using dollar quoting for the function as a whole, so the quote marks need not be doubled):

    EXECUTE 'UPDATE tbl SET '
            || quote_ident(colname)
            || ' = '
            || quote_literal(newvalue)
            || ' WHERE key = '
            || quote_literal(keyvalue);

This example shows use of the functions `quote_ident(`text`)` and `quote_literal(`text`)`. For safety, variables containing column and table identifiers should be passed to function `quote_ident`. Variables containing values that should be literal strings in the constructed command should be passed to `quote_literal`. Both take the appropriate steps to return the input text enclosed in double or single quotes respectively, with any embedded special characters properly escaped.

Note that dollar quoting is only useful for quoting fixed text. It would be a very bad idea to try to do the above example as

    EXECUTE 'UPDATE tbl SET '
            || quote_ident(colname)
            || ' = $$'
            || newvalue
            || '$$ WHERE key = '
            || quote_literal(keyvalue);

because it would break if the contents of `newvalue` happened to contain `$$`. The same objection would apply to any other dollar-quoting delimiter you might pick. So, to safely quote text that is not known in advance, you must use `quote_literal`.

A much larger example of a dynamic command and `EXECUTE` can be seen in Example 35-5, which builds and executes a `CREATE FUNCTION` command to define a new function.

## 35.6.6. Obtaining the Result Status

There are several ways to determine the effect of a command. The first method is to use the `GET DIAGNOSTICS` command, which has the form:

    GET DIAGNOSTICS variable = item [ , ... ] ;

This command allows retrieval of system status indicators. Each `item` is a key word identifying a state value to be assigned to the specified variable (which should be of the right data type to receive it). The currently available status items are `ROW_COUNT`, the number of rows processed by the last SQL command sent down to the SQL engine, and `RESULT_OID`, the OID of the last row inserted by the most recent SQL command. Note that `RESULT_OID` is only useful after an `INSERT` command.

An example:

    GET DIAGNOSTICS integer_var = ROW_COUNT;

The second method to determine the effects of a command is to check the special variable named `FOUND`, which is of type `boolean`. `FOUND` starts out false within each PL/pgSQL function call. It is set by each of the following types of statements:

- A `SELECT INTO` statement sets `FOUND` true if it returns a row, false if no row is returned.

- A `PERFORM` statement sets `FOUND` true if it produces (and discards) a row, false if no row is produced.

- `UPDATE`, `INSERT`, and `DELETE` statements set `FOUND` true if at least one row is affected, false if no row is affected.

- A `FETCH` statement sets `FOUND` true if it returns a row, false if no row is returned.

- A `FOR` statement sets `FOUND` true if it iterates one or more times, else false. This applies to all three variants of the `FOR` statement (integer `FOR` loops, record-set `FOR` loops, and dynamic record-set `FOR` loops). `FOUND` is set this way when the `FOR` loop exits; inside the execution of the loop, `FOUND` is not modified by the `FOR` statement, although it may be changed by the execution of other statements within the loop body.

`FOUND` is a local variable within each PL/pgSQL function; so any changes to it affect only the current function.

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