What's the purpose of doing: x.map { _ => () }

I have been looking at some of the Play Slick examples for building the data access layer and found the following line in the CatDAO example a bit intriguing:

def insert(cat: Cat): Future[Unit] = db.run(Cats += cat).map { _ => () }

and I wonder what's the purpose of doing .map { _ => () }

UPDATE: running the following in the Scala interpreter provides some clue but still it is not entirely clear why it is needed in the insert method above.

scala> val test = Seq(1, 2, 3)
test: Seq[Int] = List(1, 2, 3)

scala> test map { _ => () }
res0: Seq[Unit] = List((), (), ())

Solution

Without that mapping db.run method would return a number of records that were inserted into the database (returning type would be Future[Int] then). Yet the author of the code doesn't need that value, and he would like his API to return Future[Unit] instead. That's why he's using that map, which maps Int to Unit in this case (() is a value representing Unit type).