upsert-clause ON CONFLICT Railway Diagram

(1) By MarcelF on 2021-07-19 12:33:04 [link]

The railway diagram on <https://www.sqlite.org/syntax/upsert-clause.html>
(and corresponding documentation at <https://www.sqlite.org/lang_upsert.html>) implies that the brackets with the column names can be left out, i.e. "ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE column = value" is a valid upsert-clause.

In practice, this does not work. You get an "Error: near "UPDATE": syntax error". To make it work you have to specify the relevant columns. So that clause like "ON CONFLICT (indexedcolumn) DO UPDATE column = value" works. Interestingly "ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING" works as described.

So I think this is a bug and either the documentation needs to be changed or the implementation needs to be fixed to conform to the documentation. Looking forward to your feedback.

Marcel

### To reproduce run the following in a new SQLite DB:

```
INSERT INTO foobar (a, b) VALUES (1, 1) ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE SET a = 2;
```

### Result:

```
Error: near "UPDATE": syntax error
```

### Expected:

```
Error: no such table: foobar
```

### Version

SQLite Version: SQLite version 3.31.1 2020-01-27 19:55:54  
OS: Linux 5.8.0-59-generic #66~20.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 17 11:14:10 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

(2.1) By Larry Brasfield (larrybr) on 2021-07-19 14:59:11 edited from 2.0 in reply to 1

Presently documented behavior was effected for the 3.35.0 release of 2021-03-12, which was awhile after version 3.31.1 <u>[was released](https://sqlite.org/chronology.html)</u>. The [3.35.0 release notes](https://sqlite.org/releaselog/3_35_0.html) mention "Generalize UPSERT" at item 3.

I can attest that version 3.35.0 behaves as you <b>Expected</b>, having observed that personally using your input.

Unfortunately, short of using the documentation repository and rebuilding the docs for past versions, there is not a convenient way to see how past SQLite versions conform to <i>present</i> documentation.

(Added via edit:) BTW, thanks for your nicely done bug report. Even though this is not technically a bug (vis-à-vis doc/code tracking), we appreciate well-explained bug reports with repro steps, and observed/expected results.

(3) By MarcelF on 2021-07-21 09:28:32 in reply to 2.1 [link]

I had just checked my version has the upsert feature. I hadn't thought of the syntax being updated in the mean time. Thank you!