Re: BUG #4220: delete statement deleted too many rows

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 06:46:42PM +0000, Lon Varscsak wrote:
> delete from customer_transactions_detail where transaction_id in (select
> transaction_id from test);
> The transaction_id column does NOT exist in the temporary table named
> 'test').  I would think this would just result in an error, instead it
> delete all rows in the customer_transactions_detail table.

what you got is so called "correlated subquery", and is perfectly valid
- even if it's surprising sometimes.

i wrote about it in more details in here:

http://www.depesz.com/index.php/2007/09/06/postgresql-gotchas/

anyway - it's definitely not a bug.

depesz