NAME

       VALUES - compute a set of rows

SYNOPSIS

       VALUES ( expression [, ...] ) [, ...]
           [ ORDER BY sort_expression [ ASC | DESC | USING operator ] [, ...] ]
           [ LIMIT { count | ALL } ]
           [ OFFSET start [ ROW | ROWS ] ]
           [ FETCH { FIRST | NEXT } [ count ] { ROW | ROWS } ONLY ]

DESCRIPTION

       VALUES computes a row value or set of row values specified by value expressions. It is
       most commonly used to generate a “constant table” within a larger command, but it can be
       used on its own.

       When more than one row is specified, all the rows must have the same number of elements.
       The data types of the resulting table's columns are determined by combining the explicit
       or inferred types of the expressions appearing in that column, using the same rules as for
       UNION (see Section 10.5).

       Within larger commands, VALUES is syntactically allowed anywhere that SELECT is. Because
       it is treated like a SELECT by the grammar, it is possible to use the ORDER BY, LIMIT (or
       equivalently FETCH FIRST), and OFFSET clauses with a VALUES command.

PARAMETERS

       expression
           A constant or expression to compute and insert at the indicated place in the resulting
           table (set of rows). In a VALUES list appearing at the top level of an INSERT, an
           expression can be replaced by DEFAULT to indicate that the destination column's
           default value should be inserted.  DEFAULT cannot be used when VALUES appears in other
           contexts.

       sort_expression
           An expression or integer constant indicating how to sort the result rows. This
           expression can refer to the columns of the VALUES result as column1, column2, etc. For
           more details see ORDER BY Clause.

       operator
           A sorting operator. For details see ORDER BY Clause.

       count
           The maximum number of rows to return. For details see LIMIT Clause.

       start
           The number of rows to skip before starting to return rows. For details see LIMIT
           Clause.

NOTES

       VALUES lists with very large numbers of rows should be avoided, as you might encounter
       out-of-memory failures or poor performance.  VALUES appearing within INSERT is a special
       case (because the desired column types are known from the INSERT's target table, and need
       not be inferred by scanning the VALUES list), so it can handle larger lists than are
       practical in other contexts.

EXAMPLES

       A bare VALUES command:

           VALUES (1, 'one'), (2, 'two'), (3, 'three');

       This will return a table of two columns and three rows. It's effectively equivalent to:

           SELECT 1 AS column1, 'one' AS column2
           UNION ALL
           SELECT 2, 'two'
           UNION ALL
           SELECT 3, 'three';

       More usually, VALUES is used within a larger SQL command. The most common use is in
       INSERT:

           INSERT INTO films (code, title, did, date_prod, kind)
               VALUES ('T_601', 'Yojimbo', 106, '1961-06-16', 'Drama');

       In the context of INSERT, entries of a VALUES list can be DEFAULT to indicate that the
       column default should be used here instead of specifying a value:

           INSERT INTO films VALUES
               ('UA502', 'Bananas', 105, DEFAULT, 'Comedy', '82 minutes'),
               ('T_601', 'Yojimbo', 106, DEFAULT, 'Drama', DEFAULT);

       VALUES can also be used where a sub-SELECT might be written, for example in a FROM clause:

           SELECT f.*
             FROM films f, (VALUES('MGM', 'Horror'), ('UA', 'Sci-Fi')) AS t (studio, kind)
             WHERE f.studio = t.studio AND f.kind = t.kind;

           UPDATE employees SET salary = salary * v.increase
             FROM (VALUES(1, 200000, 1.2), (2, 400000, 1.4)) AS v (depno, target, increase)
             WHERE employees.depno = v.depno AND employees.sales >= v.target;

       Note that an AS clause is required when VALUES is used in a FROM clause, just as is true
       for SELECT. It is not required that the AS clause specify names for all the columns, but
       it's good practice to do so. (The default column names for VALUES are column1, column2,
       etc in PostgreSQL, but these names might be different in other database systems.)

       When VALUES is used in INSERT, the values are all automatically coerced to the data type
       of the corresponding destination column. When it's used in other contexts, it might be
       necessary to specify the correct data type. If the entries are all quoted literal
       constants, coercing the first is sufficient to determine the assumed type for all:

           SELECT * FROM machines
           WHERE ip_address IN (VALUES('192.168.0.1'::inet), ('192.168.0.10'), ('192.168.1.43'));

           Tip
           For simple IN tests, it's better to rely on the list-of-scalars form of IN than to
           write a VALUES query as shown above. The list of scalars method requires less writing
           and is often more efficient.

COMPATIBILITY

       VALUES conforms to the SQL standard.  LIMIT and OFFSET are PostgreSQL extensions; see also
       under SELECT(7).

SEE ALSO

       INSERT(7), SELECT(7)