The INSERT statement is used to add a row to a table:
INSERT INTO weather VALUES ('San Francisco', 46, 50, 0.25, '1994-11-27'); |
The point type requires a coordinate pair as input, as shown here:
INSERT INTO cities VALUES ('San Francisco', '(-194.0, 53.0)'); |
The syntax used so far requires you to remember the order of the columns. An alternative syntax allows you to list the columns explicitly:
INSERT INTO weather (city, temp_lo, temp_hi, prcp, date) VALUES ('San Francisco', 43, 57, 0.0, '1994-11-29'); |
INSERT INTO weather (date, city, temp_hi, temp_lo) VALUES ('1994-11-29', 'Hayward', 54, 37); |
You should enter all the commands shown above so you will have some data to work with in the following sections.
You can use COPY to load large amounts of data from flat-text files. This is usually faster than using INSERT because the COPY command is optimized for large volumes of data. The drawback is that it allows less flexibility than INSERT. An example would be:
COPY weather FROM '/home/user/weather.txt'; |