Re: Feature Proposal: Column-Level DELETE Operation in SQL
Christophe Pettus <xof@thebuild.com>
From: Christophe Pettus <xof@thebuild.com>
To: Abhishek Hatgine <hatgineabhishek99@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Date: 2025-04-23T16:47:50Z
Lists: pgsql-general
> On Apr 21, 2025, at 09:53, Abhishek Hatgine <hatgineabhishek99@gmail.com> 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"?