insert or update in postgresql 9.1

Question

I have a bunch of insert statements with varying number of columns for their respective tables, i need to execute these queries if the record doesn't already exist.I have tried to implement this as

do $$
begin
IF not exists (SELECT 1 FROM gst_type_customer WHERE name = 'Unregistered') THEN
insert into gst_type_customer(create_date,write_date,create_uid,write_uid,name) values((now() at time zone 'UTC'),(now() at time zone 'UTC'),1,1,'Unregistered');
END IF;
end
$$

even though the above code does work although implementing for a bulk of queries would require a lot of time, so i thought of making a stored procedure which i could call as

merge_check(insertquery,name[column to check for duplication],value)

but I'm unable to execute the insert query directly.

so far I have come up with

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION merge_tabla(data text)
RETURNS void AS
$BODY$
BEGIN
  execute(data);
END;
$BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql


select merge_table("insert into gst_type_customer(name) values('Unregistered')")

but I get an error saying

column "insert into gst_type_customer(name) values('Unregistered')" does not exist

Answer 1

The error You are getting is caused by using double quotes when calling the function. This should work:

select merge_table(E'insert into gst_type_customer(name) values(\'Unregistered\')'::text)

You need to use single quotes (double quotes are used for column names, single quotes for string literals) and escape any single quotes in the original query string.