mysql conditional insert - if not exists insert

Question

Is there a query that will just check for the record and if it doesn't exists insert? I don't want to on duplicate update or replace. Looking for a one query solution, looked at other answer but not really what I was hoping for.

Table:

name|value|id
------------------
phill|person|12345

pseudo query:

IF NOT EXISTS(name='phill', value='person', id=12345) INSERT INTO table_name

Answer 1

Use REPLACE - works exactly like INSERT, except that if an old row in the table has the same value as a new row for a PRIMARY KEY or a UNIQUE index, the old row is deleted before the new row is inserted.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replace.html

-- For your example query
REPLACE INTO table_name(name, value, id) VALUES
('phill', 'person', 12345) 

Edit: Since you can't use REPLACE another option is to: set constraint indexes for the table data (primary key, uniqueness) and use INSERT IGNORE

INSERT IGNORE INTO table_name
SET name = 'phill',
    value = 'person',
    id = 12345;

Answer 2

How about doing an insert from a select query which has a sub-query to only return a row if the row does not already exist?

Pseudocode:

INSERT INTO TABLE_FOO (...)
SELECT @VAR1, VAR2 ...
FROM DUMMYTABLE -- THIS TABLE SHOULD CONTAIN 1 RECORD OF ANYTHING
                -- IN CASE THE FROM IS REQUIRED
WHERE (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TABLE_FOO WHERE COLUMN1 = @VAR1) = 0

This pattern should work, you'll just need to get the syntax correct for MySQL.