Help with updating databse with cfloop

Question

I want to move data from one column to another. I thought I could just query points2 column then use a cfloop to update the data to points1 column. Finally null out points2 column.
Below is my code on the first 2 steps. Unfortunately, I get the following error:
Syntax error in UPDATE statement.
The error occurred in wwwroot\forms\changepoints.cfm Line 18
<cfquery name="getPoints" datasource="#dsn2#">
SELECT leaderID, points2
from leaderboard
</cfquery>
<cfloop query="getPoints" startrow=1 >
  <CFQUERY NAME="DoUpdate" DATASOURCE="#dsn2#">
       UPDATE leaderboard
       SET points1=#getPoints.points2#
      WHERE leaderID=#getPoints.leaderID#    (line 18)
    </CFQUERY>
</cfloop>
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Like Dan said before, I think you could replace this:
<!--- query to get all points --->
<cfquery name="getPoints" datasource="#dsn#">
SELECT leaderID, points2
from leaderboard
where (points2 IS not NULL) AND (tournID = 1)
</cfquery>
<!--- loop the points into the new column: points2 --->
<cfloop query="getPoints" startrow=1 >
  <CFQUERY NAME="DoUpdate" DATASOURCE="#dsn#">
       UPDATE leaderboard
       SET points1=#getPoints.points2#
       WHERE (leaderID=#getPoints.leaderID#) AND (tournID = 1)
    </CFQUERY>
</cfloop>
With this:
<cfquery name="updatePoints" datasource="#dsn#">
UPDATE leaderboard
SET points1=points2
WHERE (points2 IS NOT NULL) AND tournID =1
</cfquery>
Update queries run record by record, so you don't have to worry about it scrambling the values between rows (which you expressed as a concern in reply to Dan).  It's best to let the database handle this rather than by looping in ColdFusion - it will be much more efficient that way.
-Carl V.