public inbox for [email protected]  

help / color / mirror / Atom feed

From: Bruce Momjian <[email protected]>
To: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [DOCS] BUG #7543: Invalid table alias: DELETE FROM table *
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 11:41:59 -0400
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 11:58:06PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> [email protected] writes:
> > I sometime see my users delete all rows from a table using a command like
> > this:
> 
> > DELETE FROM customer *;
> 
> > The question is: what is the star? Is it a table alias or an
> > output_expression?
> 
> Neither; it specifies to search the table and its inheritance children,
> ie, the opposite of ONLY.  This has been the default behavior (unless
> you change the setting of sql_inheritance) for many years, so "*" has
> largely fallen into disuse; but it's still accepted.
> 
> However ... I went looking for documentation on this point, and I'm
> darned if I can find any.  There certainly used to be some, but
> apparently somebody got over-eager about editing the docs to reflect
> the modern default behavior.  The "*" doesn't even appear in the syntax
> summaries for most of the commands where it's allowed, which is flat
> wrong --- anywhere you can write "ONLY tablename", it's valid to write
> "tablename*" instead.
> 
> So we have some docs work to do.  Thanks for pointing it out.

Is there any value to having * vs just not using ONLY?  I am not sure
documenting this is helping us, and it would add more clutter.  Isn't
this like how we don't document the old COPY syntax.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <[email protected]>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

  + It's impossible for everything to be true. +

view thread (4+ messages)  latest in thread

reply

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Reply to all the recipients using the --to and --cc options:
  reply via email

  To: [email protected]
  Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
  Subject: Re: [DOCS] BUG #7543: Invalid table alias: DELETE FROM table *
  In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

This inbox is served by agora; see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox