Home/ Questions/Q 6202903
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-24T04:49:13+00:00

I like to do something like this: UPDATE articles SET live = 1 WHERE

  • 0

I like to do something like this:

UPDATE articles
SET live = 1
WHERE aid=3
ORDER BY created DESC
LIMIT 1

The newest article should be live. This is often required in my little CMS. But this query returns an error:

#1221 - Incorrect usage of UPDATE and ORDER BY

Is it not allowed to use ORDER BY or LIMIT in UPDATE queries?

I tried it with a subquery:

UPDATE articles
SET live=1
WHERE id= (SELECT id FROM articles WHERE aid=3 ORDER BY created DESC LIMIT 1)

But this isn’t allowed, too…You must not use the same table in UPDATE and SELECT queries in one query…

What’s the solution? I don’t want to create a TMP table, because this needs to be done often. Is a PHP workaround necessary?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It just plainly works, the only limit is you can only use a single table in the update, not multiple ones (joins and the like). See the the docs. If you need it really bad with a multiple table statement, you can use a LEFT JOIN to the same table to select only the row for which there is no larger ‘created’ value provided you have a non-nullable column.

    • 0