>> oups. just thumbled over this as well when i forgot a FROM in a WHERE ...
>> IN
>> (....) and damaged quite some data. the bad query went like this:
>>
>> SELECT * FROM movies.names WHERE mov_id IN (SELECT DISTINCT mov_id WHERE
>> mov_name like '%, %' LIMIT 2)
>>
>> the subselect is missing a FROM <table>. in that case, pgsql seemed to
>> also
>> ignore the LIMIT 2 and returned 3706 records out of ~130000...
>
> and the UPDATE was?

that was done by the application with the returned recordset.

> also the limit applies only to the subselect, it has nothing to do
> with the upper query so the upper query can return more than number of
> rows specified in the subselect...

IF the subquery would only have returned 2 ids, then there would be at most
like +/-10 records affected. each mov_id can hold one or more (usuals up to
5) names. but here, the subquery seemed to return ~3700 distinct mov_ids,
thus around 37000 names where damaged by the following programmatical
updates instead of only a hands full...

> LIMIT is often meaningfull only in conjuction with ORDER BY

yep but not here. all i wanted to do is to get names from 2 movies and run
an *observed* edit on them.

what did pgsql actually do with that subquery? did it return all records for
which mov_name match '%, %'?

- thomas



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