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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T17:30:41+00:00

I was looking through the AskTom site and found what should be a very

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I was looking through the AskTom site and found what should be a very powerful tool for update statments but my statement refuses to accept the alias after the subquery.
Can someone please explain this for me and possibly show a solution?

Update (SELECT T.Date_,T.Name_ 
        FROM TableA T, TableB P
        WHERE P.Date_ = T.Date_
        AND   P.Name_ = T.Name_) SET P.ID = T.Name_

There may be other issues as to how to run this type of update and That would be a bonus. I am more interested at this point in trying to understand the alias problem. I have tried to sub in

TableB.ID = TableA.Name_

but no luck

Specifically the error is ORA-00904 invalid identifier.

As always thanks in advance.

The above issue has been answered for me but I do have some others as I try to understand it.

I now get ORA-01779 cannot modify a column which maps to a non-key preserved table.
I presume this is referring to the table I’m trying to update correct? As I could update from a view or any other proper source that may not have a pk or fk.

Can this type of update statement work with Oracle temp tables or can I expect problems?

Can I use this type of statement with a case statement to update multiple columns in TableA or will there be problems?

Thanks again.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    When you perform an UPDATE (query) operation, the only columns you can use outside the parentheses are the names of columns returned by the query – in this case Date_ and Name_. The table aliases you used in the query are not valid outside the parentheses either.

    What you therefore need is:

    Update (SELECT P.ID ,T.Name_ 
        FROM TableA T, TableB P
        WHERE P.Date_ = T.Date_
        AND   P.Name_ = T.Name_) SET ID = Name_
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