You pretty much have to do so. The conflict could be on the column with the default value after all. And obviously you can't just rollback the sequence/autoinc

You pretty much have to do so. The conflict could be on the column with the default value after all. And obviously you can't just rollback the sequence/autoincrement value after deciding to update because that'd either require locking the sequence for the duration (horrible for concurrency) or would pose problems with other sessions already having used further values.