INSERT INTO or UPDATE with two conditions - mysql

Question

This problem seems easy at first sight, but I simply have not found a solution that is reasonable time wise.
Consider a table with the following characteristics:
ID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT
name INTEGER
values1 INTEGER
values2 INTEGER
dates DATE
Every day, N amount of new rows are generated, for dates into the future, and with the 'name' coming from a finite list. I would like to insert a new row when there is new data, but if there is already a row with 'name' and 'dates', simply update it.
Please note that a current proposed solution of an SPROC that checks the conditional is not feasible, as this is data being pushed from another language.

Answer 1

that is what insert on duplicate key update is for.
The Manual page for it is here.
The trick is that the table needs to have a unique key (can be a composite) so that the clash of doing an insert can be detected. As such, the update to occur on that row, otherwise an insert. It can be a primary key, of course.
In your case, you could have a composite key such as
unique key(theName,theDate)
If the row is already there, the clash is detected, and the update happens.
Here is a complete example
create table myThing
( id int auto_increment primary key,
name int not null,
values1 int not null,
values2 int not null,
dates date not null,
unique key(name,dates) -- <---- this line here is darn important
);
insert myThing(name,values1,values2,dates) values (777,1,1,'2015-07-11') on duplicate key update values2=values2+1;
insert myThing(name,values1,values2,dates) values (778,1,1,'2015-07-11') on duplicate key update values2=values2+1;
-- do the 1st one a few more times:
insert myThing(name,values1,values2,dates) values (777,1,1,'2015-07-11') on duplicate key update values2=values2+1;
insert myThing(name,values1,values2,dates) values (777,1,1,'2015-07-11') on duplicate key update values2=values2+1;
insert myThing(name,values1,values2,dates) values (777,1,1,'2015-07-11') on duplicate key update values2=values2+1;
show results
select * from myThing;
+----+------+---------+---------+------------+
| id | name | values1 | values2 | dates |
+----+------+---------+---------+------------+
| 1 | 777 | 1 | 4 | 2015-07-11 |
| 2 | 778 | 1 | 1 | 2015-07-11 |
+----+------+---------+---------+------------+
As expected, insert on duplicate key update works, just 2 rows.

Answer 2

This is easy:
Create a unique key on the columns to check
Use the INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE construct