Most efficient way to do a bulk UPDATE with pairs of input - postgresql

Question

Suppose I want to do a bulk update, setting a=b for a collection of a values. This can easily be done with a sequence of UPDATE queries:
UPDATE foo SET value='foo' WHERE id=1
UPDATE foo SET value='bar' WHERE id=2
UPDATE foo SET value='baz' WHERE id=3
But now I suppose I want to do this in bulk. I have a two dimensional array containing the ids and new values:
[ [ 1, 'foo' ]
[ 2, 'bar' ]
[ 3, 'baz' ] ]
Is there an efficient way to do these three UPDATEs in a single SQL query?
Some solutions I have considered:
A temporary table
CREATE TABLE temp ...;
INSERT INTO temp (id,value) VALUES (....);
UPDATE foo USING temp ...
But this really just moves the problem. Although it may be easier (or at least less ugly) to do a bulk INSERT, there are still a minimum of three queries.
Denormalize the input by passing the data pairs as SQL arrays. This makes the query incredibly ugly, though
UPDATE foo
USING (
SELECT
split_part(x,',',1)::INT AS id,
split_part(x,',',2)::VARCHAR AS value
FROM (
SELECT UNNEST(ARRAY['1,foo','2,bar','3,baz']) AS x
) AS x;
)
SET value=x.value WHERE id=x.id
This makes it possible to use a single query, but makes that query ugly, and inefficient (especially for mixed and/or complex data types).
Is there a better solution? Or should I resort to multiple UPDATE queries?

Answer 1

Normally you want to batch-update from a table with sufficient index to make the merge easy:
CREATE TEMP TABLE updates_table
( id integer not null primary key
, val varchar
);
INSERT into updates_table(id, val) VALUES
( 1, 'foo' ) ,( 2, 'bar' ) ,( 3, 'baz' )
;
UPDATE target_table t
SET value = u.val
FROM updates_table u
WHERE t.id = u.id
;
So you should probably populate your update_table by something like:
INSERT into updates_table(id, val)
SELECT
split_part(x,',',1)::INT AS id,
split_part(x,',',2)::VARCHAR AS value
FROM (
SELECT UNNEST(ARRAY['1,foo','2,bar','3,baz'])
) AS x
;
Remember: an index (or the primary key) on the id field in the updates_table is important. (but for small sets like this one, a hashjoin will probably by chosen by the optimiser)
In addition: for updates, it is important to avoid updates with the same value, these cause extra rowversions to be created + plus the resulting VACUUM activity after the update was committed:
UPDATE target_table t
SET value = u.val
FROM updates_table u
WHERE t.id = u.id
AND (t.value IS NULL OR t.value <> u.value)
;

Answer 2

You can use CASE conditional expression:
UPDATE foo
SET "value" = CASE id
WHEN 1 THEN 'foo'
WHEN 2 THEN 'bar'
WHEN 3 THEN 'baz'
END