Re: [PATCH] Add support for INSERT ... SET syntax

Thanks, Ajay for reporting this.

The issue is that the INSERT...SET grammar was incorrectly using
set_clause_list which includes the UPDATE-style
multi-column assignment syntax (col1, col2) = expr. This creates
MultiAssignRef nodes that are only valid in UPDATE contexts, not INSERT.
Fix this by changing the grammer rule.

Please find attached v2 patch with the above fix. I have also added support
for different column sets in multi-row inserts.

Thanks, Andrew for the offline discussion and help on this.
--

Thanks & Regards,
Suraj kharage,

enterprisedb.com <https://www.enterprisedb.com/>

On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 11:44 AM Ajay Pal <ajay(dot)pal(dot)k(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am reporting a server crash encountered while testing the patch
> provided by Suraj. The crash is consistently triggered by the query
> attached below.
>
> postgres=# INSERT INTO emp_test SET (empno,ename)=(SELECT 1,'aa');
>
> server closed the connection unexpectedly
> This probably means the server terminated abnormally
> before or while processing the request.
> The connection to the server was lost. Attempting reset: Failed.
>
> Thanks
> Ajay
>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 9:19 PM Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)kurilemu(dot)de>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 2026-Mar-30, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> >
> > > Well, Suraj has kinda beaten me to it, but he didn't invent this
> syntax.
> > > Oracle did <
> https://oracle-base.com/articles/23/non-positional-insert-into-set-and-insert-into-by-name-clauses-23
> >
> > > and I believe there is a proposal to add it to the standard. (Unlike
> > > Suraj's, my WIP patch also supports the INSERT BY NAME variant.)
> >
> > Hmm, I don't see any WIP patch from you -- are you talking about this
> > patch from July 2019?
> >
> https://postgr.es/m/CA+A-St+NntBh2EGu3a0xbVxJFzaeEOn=Vn_V84OuhM59_HKarQ@mail.gmail.com
> >
> > Funnily enough, we have an even older proposal from 2016,
> > https://postgr.es/m/709e06c0-59c9-ccec-d216-21e38cb5ed61@joh.to
> >
> > It seems this is quite a popular missing feature, as Marko's patch was
> > also asked about in February 2019:
> > https://postgr.es/m/e58dd487-7ed4-3f95-c63c-24200ed768be@berkvens.net
> >
> > --
> > Álvaro Herrera Breisgau, Deutschland —
> https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
> >
> >
>