Question

Error 1093 states that you can’t UPDATE or DELETE using a subquery if your subquery queries the table you are deleting from.

So you can’t do

delete from table1 where id in (select something from table1 where condition) ;

Ok, what’s the best way to work around that restriction, (assuming you really do need to subquery to perform the delete and cannot eliminate the self referencing subquery entirely?)

Edit:

Here’s the query for those who are interested:

mysql> desc adjacencies ;
+---------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field   | Type    | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+---------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| parent  | int(11) | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       |
| child   | int(11) | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       |
| pathLen | int(11) | NO   |     | NULL    |       |
+---------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+



-- The query is going to
-- tell all my children to
-- stop thinking my old parents
-- are still their parents

delete from adjacencies
where parent in 
(
-- ALL MY PARENTS,grandparents
  select parent
  from adjacencies
  where child=@me
  and parent!=@me
)

-- only concerns the relations of my
-- grandparents WHERE MY CHILDREN ARE CONCERNED
and child in
(
  -- get all my children
  select child
  from adjacencies
  where parent=@me
)

;

So what I’ve tried so far is creating a temporary table called adjsToDelete

create temporary table adjsToRemove( parent int, child int ) ;
insert into adjsToRemove...

So now I have a collection of relations to delete, where the parent/child pairs each uniquely identify a row to delete. But how do I delete each pair from the adjacencies table now?

It seems I need to add a unique auto_incremented key to each entry in adjacencies, is that right?

Answer 1

Currently, you cannot delete from a table and select from the same table in a subquery
– details

You just cannot cannot specify target table for delete

one of my workaround : MySQL DELETE FROM with subquery as condition