Pretend I have a table like id, name, address


And I want to insert something into it, then now the table is like


1, john, john's address


Is there an way to, when I try to add another john to that table with a different address, instead making the table like


1, john, john's address
2, john, john's new address


it becomes like


1, john, john's new address  ? Is that what insert on duplicate key update is for?

Thanks dada, I love you

But like, what if there is an ID I cannot ditch?

Normalization. Separate your tables into:

Employees (idE, name)
Addresses (idA, idE, address)

That way you'll only need to update the table addresses, the importance relies into having employers' id as a foreign key.

If that's the case:

UPDATE employees
SET adress = newadress
WHERE id = '1'

There could be more elaborated answers with TRIGGERS and STORED PROCEDURES, I suppose it depends on the complexity of your dB. I'd go with SP, since it can receive parameters ('id', in this case).

Thanks, I used insert into blah blah blah ignore passing the ID every time I update a record and it quite works