INSERT IGNORE For Kohana

I’ve been using the Kohana framework for my PHP projects for a while now. One thing that’s annoying is lack of support for INSERT IGNORE and REPLACE INTO. Now, I understand that these are MySQL-specific, and not supported in other RDBMS, but there are equivalents in Oracle. INSERT IGNORE is commonly used on tables where there is an auto incrementing ID field or just a unique index on a particular column.

Anyway, here’s the code that acts like the Database library’s insert() function but ignores any duplicate key exceptions:

/**
* Inserts the row if it's new and returns the ID, or just returns the
* ID if it already exists. The table must have a column called 'id'
* that is the INTEGER AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY style in
* order to return an ID.
**/

function _create_if_not_exists( $table, $row, $needs_id=true ) {
    $ret = true;
    // Try to insert - if it doesn't exist we'll get an ID of zero
    $columns = join( ',', array_keys( $row ) );
    $placeholders = join( ',', array_fill( 0, count( $row ), '?' ) );
    $q = $this->db->query( "INSERT IGNORE INTO $table ($columns) ".
                                              "VALUES ($placeholders)", array_values( $row ) );
    if( $needs_id == true ) {
        $ret = $q->insert_id();
        if( $ret == 0 ) {
            $q = $this->db->getwhere( $table, $row );
            if( $q->count() > 0 ) {
                $result = $q->result_array( false );
                $ret = $result[ 0 ][ 'id' ];
            }
        }
    }
    return $ret;
}