Question

When I type this query in MySQL :

DELETE FROM myTable WHERE ID = ( SELECT Min( ID ) FROM myTable )

I get the following error message :

#1093 - You can't specify target table 'myTable' for update in FROM clause

What is the problem ?

What is the right equivalent ?

Answer 1

Basically in MySQL you can’t do an update on a table which you use in the SELECT part. For detail you could check this behaviour which is documented at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/update.html

In theory every DELETE is an UPDATE so that’s why you get this error.

You could simply do following:

DELETE FROM myTable 
ORDER BY my_id
LIMIT 1;