This new tutorial on the PHPro.org website shows how to implement a common database feature, ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, in a SQLite database with PHP.

SQLite is an ultra lite database replacement that comes bundled with PHP. Because of its light weight it lacks many of the features found in more robust applications such as MySQL, PostgresQL and others. One of the features that is lacking is the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE that is often used to automatically UPDATE a record, should a duplicate field be found. Here a demonstration is provided to duplicate this behaviour using PHP Exceptions.

Their example creates a table of animals and inserts several to act as a base. They show insert method, how to get the information back out and what happens when you try add a duplicate value to the table. Normally this just results in an exception being displayed but, when caught with exception handling, it can be redirected into an update statement to change that animal's current information.