--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Adam" <s3057043@y...> wrote:

> You seem a little confused about the role of the queries etc.
> Firebird will raise an exception if your primary key is not unique.
> In other words, you must be supplying a idEmployeur that is already
> in the table (a duplicate), and that is against the whole concept

of

> a primary key. Your application should catch the exception and

react

> accordingly. It would be very confusing logic to have the database
> quietly eat any duplicate data, you would not then know where your
> record went. Instead, you now have a mechanism where the database
> informs you that the query operation failed, and why it failed. Use
> it to your advantage.
>
> In fact, the way you would do input validation in the before insert
> trigger would be to raise a custom exception to prevent the insert
> from succeeding.
>
> Adam

Interesting topic as I'm in a similiar situation. I'm importing chess
games into my database, but I want to insert only new and unique
positions / moves.

I have been looking for the most efficient way to achieve this. At
the
moment I'm using ExecuteScalar() for each position to see if it
already exists and only if not I will add it. However, just this
check
takes most of the time of my import - almost independly whether the
database is empty or has already 10.000 entries.

I too was wondering whether I should make this exist test at all. My
train of thought: The database is doing exactly the same test before
it inserts the row anyway so I'm doing redundant work and thus waste
time. However, I disliked the idea to always try to add a new entry
and catch the error if it already exists. Usually raised errors are
quite time consuming and in general I believed so far this is a bad
programming habit. I will give this a try though.

Stefan