[homami]

I find SQL INSERT statement not intuitive. I can understand why SQL requires me to declare the field names and then the values of a new row that I am inserting; but it would've been a huge time saver if SQL had a key-value dictionary-like syntax:

    INSERT INTO "my_table"
       "col1": value1,
       "col2": value2,
       ...

[castorp]

And when you need to insert more than one row, you repeat the column name over and over again for each row - not a good idea either.

[rspeele]

Single-row inserts are super common in both application code and in interactive usage of SQL, so I think that it is worth it to have a syntax for them that reduces this common error. Especially when a table has many columns of the same type (like booleans). E.g.

insert into Permissions(UserId, Create, Read, Update, Delete, Share, ForceUnlock, LaunchNukes) values (12345, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1);

When I wrote my (now unmaintained) statically typed SQL dialect for F#, which compiles to underlying SQLite/Postgres/MSSQL, I added a single-row insert with Field=Value because it's nice to have and took no more than 30 minutes to do. It's only a tweak to the parser after all -- you just parse it to the same AST used to represent the `INSERT ... VALUES` clause and all later stages of the compilation do not need to know about it.

https://rspeele.gitbooks.io/rezoom-sql/doc/Language/InsertSt...

[magicalhippo]

The DB we use at work (SQLAnywhere) supports inserting from select, and using auto column name matching, so for a table with columns (name, en1, en2) you could have

    INSERT INTO tbl WITH AUTO NAME
    SELECT 'foo' AS name, 1 AS en1, 0 AS en2;

Not nearly as neat as the direct key=value syntax but...

[PZ81JUXJE7uJ]

MySQL supports a insert/set statement:

    INSERT INTO tbl SET a = 1, b = 2;

[castorp]

How does that look like with a multi-row insert?