Unnecessary read query on ORM insert

[sminnee]

This goes way back to 2008: 2e955b4...

In order to correct a mistaken update query that should be an insert, there's an extra read query to check if the value is already in the database. This isn't efficient.

Instead, this should probably use the Database::affectedRows() instead.

[tractorcow]

so

$affected = 'INSERT IF NOT EXISTS'
if (!$affected) { 'UPDATE' }

Right?

[sminnee]

It's the other way around - it needs to convert an update query to an insert one.

The other approach would be to remove this switch-over altogether and just assume that an update is correct. I think that it's probably a band-aid over other ORM bugs.

[sminnee]

I've created #7073. affectedRows() didn't seem to work but I suspect that the whole feature might be unnecessary.

[dhensby]

During my dbal work I found this strange also. I think it's pretty much the only reason we have the ability to turn an insert into a select, which is also a strange api which is, unsurprisingly, missing from dbal.

[sminnee]

I've hit a few test failures on this. I think the use-case its catering to is:

• create a page, set title
• write
• convert to blogpage, set author
• write

Writing an existing blogpage should be UPDATEs, not INSERTs. However, at the time of class conversion I don't know that the blank record is created. So the updates, if they fail, switch over to an insert.

The other, better, way of fixing this would be to generate the missing records at the time they're needed.

A couple of situations come to mind:

• dev/build creates a new subclass table
• changing the class of an existing record

Note: using affectedRows() doesn't seem to work; I think it returns 0 if you try to re-write the same data.

[sminnee]

$affected = 'INSERT IF NOT EXISTS'
if (!$affected) { 'UPDATE' }

The weakness of this approach is that it still executes 2 queries in the normal case. Given the 2nd query is an edge-case for when data is inconsistent, I don't think that's good.

An UPSERT query, if the backend allows, would be better, but even that I suspect is slower than an UPDATE

[sminnee]

An initial read suggests that MySQL does an upsert and PostgreSQL does not, and that under the hood they're pretty hard things to do. So fixing the root cause is likely the best approach here.