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Advanced UPSERT patterns — conditional updates, xmax detection, and soft-delete-aware indexes?

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01

Understand the problem

Build idempotent pipelines with WHERE on DO UPDATE, RETURNING to detect insert vs update, and partial indexes.

upsertidempotencyconstraints
02

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03

Study the solution

Add DO UPDATE … WHERE EXCLUDED.updated_at > users.updated_at to keep newest-wins, use RETURNING (xmax=0) to tell insert from update, and match conflict targets to partial unique indexes for soft-delete tables.

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