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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:59:56+00:00

I have a question regarding an update function I created… CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION

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I have a question regarding an update function I created…

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION rm_category_update(icompany bpchar, iraw_mat_cat_code bpchar, iraw_mat_cat_desc bpchar)  RETURNS character AS  $BODY$  DECLARE    loc_result    CHAR(50);   BEGIN  UPDATE rm_category   SET     raw_mat_cat_code    = iraw_mat_cat_code,     raw_mat_cat_desc    = iraw_mat_cat_desc  WHERE company = icompany;  loc_result = 'success';  RETURN loc_result ;  END;  $BODY$  LANGUAGE 'plpgsql' VOLATILE;  ALTER FUNCTION rm_category_update(icompany bpchar, iraw_mat_cat_code bpchar, iraw_mat_cat_desc bpchar) OWNER TO postgres;

Okay, so if I input a record that doesn’t exist, for example 9, it returns success even though I know it has updated nothing!

Does SQL not throw errors if it is updating a non-existent row??

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. It depends on the DBMS – but no, it should not throw an error. According to the SQL standard (ISO/IEC 9075:2008 these days), it should set the SQLNOTFOUND condition (+100), which is separate from any error condition. (With Informix, if you use a MODE ANSI database, you get SQLNOTFOUND; if you use a non-ANSI database, you get 0 (no error) as the condition. The reasons for that pre-date the original SQL-86 standard.)

    Note that SQL is a set-based language. What you requested was that the statement update a set of (matching) rows — and it is perfectly valid to update a set containing zero (matching) rows.

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