Tom Lane wrote: > Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@commandprompt.com> writes: > > Bruce Momjian wrote: > >> So the problem is that our DELETE ... USING does not allow ANSI join > >> syntax? Can that be added? > > > Not sure about that. USING is already an extension to the standard, so > > if we extend it a bit more, it can't be a problem, can it? > > I don't see any very good way to extend the USING syntax to allow the > target table to be outer-joined to something else. Some other systems > allow it by letting you re-specify the target in the other clause, > equivalently to > > DELETE FROM target t USING t LEFT JOIN other_table ot ON ... > > but we have always considered that the target is *not* to be identified > with any member of the FROM/USING clause, so it would be a serious > compatibility break to change that now.
Let's look at this a little closer. We can use an alias in the DELETE FROM clause: test=> DELETE FROM test t; test=> DELETE FROM test t USING test; What we cannot currently do is reference test twice: test=> DELETE FROM test USING test; ERROR: table name "test" specified more than once test=> DELETE FROM test t USING test t; ERROR: table name "t" specified more than once As far as I understand it, allowing ANSI joins in USING would simple mean removing that error message and linking the two table aliases. -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers