How to 'insert if not exists' in MySQL? I started by googling, and found this article which talks about mutex tables. I have a table with ~14 million records. If I want to add more data in the same format, is there a way to ensure the record I want to insert does not already exist without using a pair of queries (ie, one query to check and one to insert is the result set is empty)? Does a unique constraint on a field guarantee the insert will fail