Oracle 10g - delete record that doesn't exist
 

Hello, everyone.

In Oracle 10g, if an attempt is made to delete a record from the database that doesn't exist, will it throw an error?

If it throws an error, then it's not conformant with ANSI SQL, at all.

ANSI says a DELETE that affects zero records is never an error.

I would be truly surprised if Oracle went against ANSI on something this fundamental.

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If you are only looking to see how many records were deleted, most DB interfaces will give you that information.

Ummm...I'm assuming you meant that to read
If the database itself doesn't exist, yes, you will get an error.

Thanks, Pedant. I didn't think it would, but I've got a weird error when trying to delete a record. Trying to track down what is causing it, and thought that _maybe_ Oracle was erroring if the record did not exist.

Oracle does allow you to DELETE from views, but then it puts restrictions on that (which I think you'd need to be an Oracle guru to understand...some are really weird!).

Is it possible that is what is happening here? That you think you are deleting from a table but it's really from a VIEW of a table?

I don't know about VIEW, but I do know that whenever there's that kind of an issue, it's usually with SYNONYMS, not VIEWS.