Oracle 10g - delete record that doesn't exist

[WolfShade]

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?

[Old Pedant]

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.

[Old Pedant]

delete a record from the database that doesn't exist

Ummm...I'm assuming you meant that to read

delete a non-existent record from an existing database

If the database itself doesn't exist, yes, you will get an error.

[WolfShade]

Originally Posted by Old Pedant

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.

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.

[Old Pedant]

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?

[WolfShade]

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.