Luke Maciak wrote:

LOL! Good point. I’m making this more complex than it needs to be, aren’t I?

:D. But, as you say, it is a good hint that the IF operator (or CASE, which I thought were more portable?) can be useful also as part of UPDATEs, and not only SELECTs.

@ Tino:

LOL! Good point. I’m making this more complex than it needs to be, aren’t I?

Then again, the traditional format won’t work in the second high-low example so this format is still useful for creating compact MySQL queries. :)

Or, why not just the more portable:
UPDATE mytable SET foo=’bar’ WHERE id=’69’ and foo IS NULL;

For what it’s worth, I like these posts. Keep ’em coming.