How to populate a table's foreign keys from other tables

Question

I've got the following tables, of which translation is empty and I'm trying to fill:

translation {
    id
    translated
    language_id
    template_id
}

language {
    id
    langname
    langcode
}

template {
    id
    tplname
    source
    domain
    total
}

The source data to fill translation is a temporary table that I've populated from an external CSV file:

tmp_table {
    id
    translated
    langname
    tplname
    source
    domain
}

What I'd like to do is to fill translation with the values from tmp_table. The translated field can be copied directly, but I'm not quite sure how to fetch the right language_id (tmp_table.langname could be used to determine language.id) and template_id (tmp_table.tplname, tmp_table.source, tmp_table.domain together can be used to determine template.id).

It might be a trivial question, but I'm quite new to SQL and not sure what the best query should be to populate the translation table. Any ideas?

Erwin Brandstetter · Accepted Answer · 2022-06-22T21:09:18.000

6

This can be simplified to:

INSERT INTO translation (id, translated, language_id, template_id)
SELECT tmp.id, tmp.translated, l.id, t.id
FROM   tmp_table tmp
JOIN   language l USING (langname)
JOIN   template t USING (tplname, source, domain)
ORDER  BY tmp.id;

I added an ORDER BY clause that you don't strictly need, but certain queries may profit if you insert your data clustered like that (or some other way).

If you want to avoid losing rows where you can't find a matching row in language or template, make it LEFT JOIN instead of JOIN for both tables (provided that language_id and template_id can be NULL.

In addition to what I already listed under your previous question: If the INSERT is huge and constitutes a large proportion of the target table, it is probably faster to drop all indexes on the target table and recreate them afterwards. Creating indexes from scratch is a lot faster then updating them incrementally for every row.

Unique indexes also serve as constraints, so you'll have to consider whether to enforce the rules later or leave them in place.

edited Jun 22 '22 at 21:09

answered Feb 25 '12 at 20:29

Erwin Brandstetter

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Thanks! I'm not too clear on the indexes part, though. The target table was generated from Django models, and looking at it from pgadmin3, it looks like it got created with an index on each foreign key (e.g. `CREATE INDEX translation_language_id ON translation USING btree (language_id );`) - you mean that in order to increase the performance of the insert operation, I should drop all of these indexes before the insert query and then generate each one of them again with the same `CREATE INDEX [...]` query? – David Planella Feb 26 '12 at 18:11
@DavidPlanella: Exactly. This would also be safe, as the nature of the query observes the foreign key rules. If you worry about concurrent operations, do it all in one transaction. If you are not convinced this would be faster, just run a test in a copy of your database. [EXPLAIN ANALYZE](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/sql-explain.html) can be used for timing. – Erwin Brandstetter Feb 27 '12 at 11:34

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 25 '12 at 20:03

1

insert into translation (id, translated, language_id, template_id)
select tmp.id, tmp.translated, l.id, t.id
  from tmp_table tmp, language l, template t
 where l.langname = tmp.langname
   and t.tplname = tmp.tplname
   and t.source = tmp.source
   and t.domain = tmp.domain;

answered Feb 25 '12 at 20:03

Andrew Logvinov

21,181
6
52
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1

Use joins. This is very difficult to read. http://hashmysql.org/wiki/Comma_vs_JOIN – sam yi Feb 26 '12 at 02:48

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 25 '12 at 20:08

I'm not as familiar with PostgreSQL as other RDBMS but it should be something like:

   INSERT INTO translation
   SELECT s.id, s.translated, l.id, t.id FROM tmp_table s
   INNER JOIN language l ON (l.langname = s.langname)
   INNER JOIN template t ON (t.tplname = s.tplname)

Looks like someone just posted basically the same answer with slightly different syntax, but keep in mind: If there is no matching langname or tplname in the joined tables the rows from tmp_table will not get inserted at all and this will not make sure you don't create duplicates of translation.id (so make sure you don't run it more than once).

How to populate a table's foreign keys from other tables

3 Answers3

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