In my post on June 18th, I explained why the semantics of normal ad-hoc insertions with a primary key are expensive because they require disk seeks on large data sets. I previously explained why it would be better to use “replace into” or to use “insert ignore” over normal inserts. In this post, I explain why another alternative to normal inserts, “insert … on duplicate key update” is no better in MySQL, because the command incurs disk seeks.

The reason “insert ignore” and “replace into” can be made fast with