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UPDATE .. ORDER BY .. LIMIT

Applies to ✅ Open Source Edition   ✅ Express Edition   ✅ Professional Edition   ✅ Enterprise Edition

The ORDER BY and LIMIT clauses allow for updating only a subset of the data in a table, based on their ordering. This can be useful to implement queue semantics, e.g. to update only the top row, and possibly return it in one go.

Dialect support

This example using jOOQ:

update(BOOK).set(BOOK.TITLE, "New Title").orderBy(BOOK.ID.asc()).limit(1)

Translates to the following dialect specific expressions:

Aurora MySQL, DB2, MariaDB, MySQL, Trino

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
LIMIT 1

Aurora Postgres, DuckDB, Redshift, SQLite, Snowflake, Vertica, YugabyteDB

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  LIMIT 1
)

BigQuery, Exasol, HSQLDB

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  LIMIT 1
)

ClickHouse

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  LIMIT 1
)

CockroachDB

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  TITLE = 'New Title'
ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
LIMIT 1

Derby, H2, Oracle

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY
)

Firebird

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
ROWS 1

Hana

UPDATE BOOK
FROM BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  LIMIT 1
)

Informix

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT *
  FROM (
    SELECT FIRST 1 BOOK.ID
    FROM BOOK
    ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  ) x
)

MemSQL

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT *
  FROM (
    SELECT BOOK.ID
    FROM BOOK
    ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
    LIMIT 1
  ) t
)

Postgres

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY
)

SQLDataWarehouse, SQLServer, Sybase

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  BOOK.TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT TOP 1 BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
)

Teradata

UPDATE BOOK
SET
  TITLE = 'New Title'
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT *
  FROM (
    SELECT TOP 1 BOOK.ID
    FROM BOOK
    ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  ) x
)

ASE, Access

/* UNSUPPORTED */
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