public inbox for [email protected]  
help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Christophe Pettus <[email protected]>
To: Abhishek Hatgine <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Feature Proposal: Column-Level DELETE Operation in SQL
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:47:50 -0700
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAD2voTQMUmNCKBok-_HvYLqFNECRWNkvqPruq0NcsFgd6g-Odw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAD2voTQMUmNCKBok-_HvYLqFNECRWNkvqPruq0NcsFgd6g-Odw@mail.gmail.com>



> On Apr 21, 2025, at 09:53, Abhishek Hatgine <[email protected]> wrote:
> However, there’s no specific, expressive way to delete the value of a column directly. The typical workaround is to use:
> UPDATE Customers SET Address = NULL WHERE CustomerID = 103;

I'm not sure I agree that's unexpressive.  When you consider the relational model, it's not clear to me what "deleting the value of a column" means.  It could be:

1. Removing the current value, which begs the question of "replacing it with what?"
2. Dropping the column, for which we already have ALTER TABLE ... DROP COLUMN.

Can you give a bit more detail about what the state of the table is when you have "deleted the value of a column directly"?





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]
  Subject: Re: Feature Proposal: Column-Level DELETE Operation in SQL
  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