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MySQL versus PostgreSQL: Adding a 'Last Modified Time' Column to a Table

Posted in Databases and Programming on Friday, the 14th of March, 2008.

MySQL

MySQL provides a TIMESTAMP column type, for exactly this purpose. It's formatted as a standard DATETIME, but can optionally be configured to automatically set itself to the current time when the row is inserted (on by default) and/or updated (off by default). It's a breeze to add a column of this type to a table, like so:

ALTER TABLE mytable
    ADD lastmodified TIMESTAMP 
        DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP 
        ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;

Notice the crucial ON UPDATE clause, which tells MySQL to update the timestamp when the row is modified.

All rows in the lastmodified column are initially set to the 'zero' date, i.e. 0000-00-00 00:00:00. If we want to backfill the column with another value we can do that in a further step. This example sets each row's timestamp to the current date and time:

UPDATE mytable
    SET lastmodified=CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

Pretty straightforward, all in all.

PostgreSQL

Let's dive right in and view the Postgres solution in all its glory:

ALTER TABLE mytable 
    ADD lastmodified TIMESTAMP;
 
ALTER TABLE mytable 
    ALTER COLUMN lastmodified 
        SET DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;
 
UPDATE mytable
    SET lastmodified=CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;
 
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_lastmodified_column()
        RETURNS TRIGGER AS '
  BEGIN
    NEW.lastmodified = NOW();
    RETURN NEW;
  END;
' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';
 
CREATE TRIGGER update_lastmodified_modtime BEFORE UPDATE
  ON mytable FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE
  update_lastmodified_column();

That's a fair deal more complex. The big obstacle here is that Postgres doesn't have the equivalent of MySQL's TIMESTAMP type. It does a have type named TIMESTAMP, but this is analogous to MySQL's DATETIME. We'll have to reverse engineer the behaviour we want.

We'll step though the process and have a closer look at what's involved. We'll start by creating the column and specifying that inserted rows should automatically default to the current date and time. As we've seen before, PostgreSQL won't allow us to do that in one step.

ALTER TABLE mytable 
    ADD lastmodified TIMESTAMP;
 
ALTER TABLE mytable 
    ALTER COLUMN lastmodified 
        SET DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;

Again, we may wish to backfill the column:

UPDATE mytable
    SET lastmodified = CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;

As an aside, I like that Postgres has some convenient shorthand values for commonly used dates. Alongside CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, there's such options as "yesterday", "epoch" and the cosmologically questionable "-infinity". They're documented here.

So far we've created the column, backfilled it with sane values, and any newly inserted rows will be timestamped appropriately. But what about updates to rows? This is where the fun really begins.

Lacking MySQL's ON UPDATE clause, which we noted earlier, we need to create a TRIGGER. A trigger is a kind of "event handler" which is fired off (well, triggered) in response to some action, in this case UPDATEs. To make things even more interesting, Postgres deviates from the SQL99 standard by not allowing us to run SQL directly within the trigger: any functionality we require must be defined in a stored proc:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_lastmodified_column() 
        RETURNS TRIGGER AS '
  BEGIN
    NEW.lastmodified = NOW();
    RETURN NEW;
  END;
' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';

NEW is a special keyword which refers to the new version of the row. Similarly, OLD is available to us, should we need to access the previous values within the row.

Finally, we have to attach that proc to the relevant table by use of the trigger:

CREATE TRIGGER update_lastmodified_modtime BEFORE UPDATE
  ON mytable FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE
  update_lastmodified_column();

MySQL's single command has succesfully been implemented as a dozen or so lines of Postgres code. I'll give round two to MySQL, but I'll give points to PostgreSQL for making my day a little more interesting than it might otherwise have been!