MySQL Bugs: #5123: DELETE not working with EXISTS

Bug #5123	DELETE not working with EXISTS
Submitted:	20 Aug 2004 13:33	Modified:	31 Aug 2004 19:22
Reporter:	Andreas Götz	Email Updates:
Status:	Closed	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	4.1.3	OS:	Windows (WinXP SP1)
Assigned to:	Documentation Team	CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
DELTE doesn't seem to work with EXISTS (does in oracle):

SELECT * FROM actors a WHERE exists (
SELECT '1' FROM `actors` b WHERE b.name = a.name and b.id <> a.id)
and actorid = ''

works fine

How to repeat:
DELETE FROM actors a WHERE exists (
SELECT '1' FROM `actors` b WHERE b.name = a.name and b.id <> a.id)
and actorid = ''

throws a sql error

Suggested fix:
enable delete with exists- this will get rid of the ugly temporary tables nobady wants :)

Dear User,

Thank you for your bug report!  This is a feature request and that is one of the fields which I 
cannot change.

If you would like to see this feature could you re-submit this and mark it as a feature request?

Best Regards

Dear User,

I apologize, I can change this to a feature request and I just have :).

Best Regards

Matthew,

from the documentation I'm not sure why this is a feature request? Both select and delete seem to share the same where_definitions to be used. Why should the EXISTS then work with SELECT, but not with DELETE?

Thanks,
Andi

Thank you for bugreport! 
It is current limitation, one can't change table and select the same table in subquery in 
one statement. And it looks like our documentation lack description of it, I hope it will be 
fixed, soon.

Thank you for your bug report. This issue has been addressed in the
documentation. The updated documentation will appear on our website
shortly, and will be included in the next release of the relevant
product(s).

It seems that in version 5.0 this bug still exists. Neither is it changed in the documentation. To me it seems like a rather large issue,  perhaps something should be done about it?