Is there anyway to UPDATE a series of columns on a row with a composite type record/row?
There are actually lots of posts regarding this..


Support UPDATE table SET(*)=...
WIP patch for multiple column assignment in UPDATE
Supporting multiple column assignment in UPDATE (9.5 project)
Better handling of UPDATE multiple-assignment row expressions


However, according to /u/pstef, one of these is committed, and this syntax now works on HEAD, though @ypercubeᵀᴹ reports it does not work on 9.6.5

UPDATE foo SET (a,b,c,d) = ROW(10,9,8,7);


The docs don't say much about this


  According to the standard, the source value for a parenthesized sub-list of target column names can be any row-valued expression yielding the correct number of columns. **PostgreSQL only allows the source value to be a row constructor or a sub-SELECT. **An individual column's updated value can be specified as DEFAULT in the row-constructor case, but not inside a sub-SELECT.


But you can also see at the syntax for UPDATE

   ( column_name [, ...] ) = [ ROW ] ( { expression | DEFAULT } [, ...] ) |