PG Phriday: CONFLICT of Interests
MySQL has had a REPLACE INTO syntax to perform “UPSERT” logic since practically the very beginning. For the longest time, users who wanted to switch to Postgres, but for whatever reason relied on this functionality, were essentially trapped. Postgres 9.5 changed all that, but why did it take so long? As with much of Postgres history, it’s a long story.
To really understand where Postgres started, we need to look at the “old” way of handling a row merge.