DBLINK_B...QL_INSERT(3)

💖 NAME 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the DBLINK_B...QL_INSERT(3) page from the PostgreSQL 17.11 Documentation — yes, the whole manual-name thing is folded in right here instead of copied as a header line. The function is dblink_build_sql_insert, and no cap: it builds an INSERT statement using a local tuple, replacing the primary key field values with alternative supplied values. slay.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

dblink_build_sql_insert(text relname,
                        int2vector primary_key_attnums,
                        integer num_primary_key_atts,
                        text[] src_pk_att_vals_array,
                        text[] tgt_pk_att_vals_array) returns text

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So dblink_build_sql_insert is lowkey useful for doing selective replication of a local table to a remote database. It selects a row from the local table based on primary key, and then builds an SQL INSERT command that will duplicate that row, but with the primary key values replaced by the values in the last argument. (To make an exact copy of the row, just specify the same values for the last two arguments.) It’s giving “copy that row but make it a little different,” fr fr. 💅

🌸 ARGUMENTS 🌸

• relname — Name of a local relation, for example foo or myschema.mytab. Include double quotes if the name is mixed-case or contains special characters, for example "FooBar"; without quotes, the string will be folded to lower case.
• primary_key_attnums — Attribute numbers (1-based) of the primary key fields, for example 1 2.
• num_primary_key_atts — The number of primary key fields.
• src_pk_att_vals_array — Values of the primary key fields to be used to look up the local tuple. Each field is represented in text form. An error is thrown if there is no local row with these primary key values. 🫶
• tgt_pk_att_vals_array — Values of the primary key fields to be placed in the resulting INSERT command. Each field is represented in text form.

👑 RETURN VALUE 👑

Returns the requested SQL statement as text. That’s it, that’s the return value, periodt.

💅 NOTES 💅

⚠️ caveat time, bestie: As of PostgreSQL 9.0, the attribute numbers in primary_key_attnums are interpreted as logical column numbers, corresponding to the column's position in SELECT * FROM relname. Previous versions interpreted the numbers as physical column positions. There is a difference if any column(s) to the left of the indicated column have been dropped during the lifetime of the table.

🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

okay so here’s the example, and it ate:

           SELECT dblink_build_sql_insert('foo', '1 2', 2, '{"1", "a"}', '{"1", "b''a"}');
                        dblink_build_sql_insert
           --------------------------------------------------
            INSERT INTO foo(f1,f2,f3) VALUES('1','b''a','1')
           (1 row)

🫶 that’s the whole page, bestie — PostgreSQL 17.11, 2026, and the page tag DBLINK_B...QL_INSERT(3). 💅✨