SQLite Forum

DELETE FROM … RETURNING
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> I can't see a situation in which you would want to UPDATE or DELETE whole blobs of records, but then also needing to fine-grain control exactly which of them go first, I mean, not unless you are using a severely broken relational DB schema.

In the case of DELETE, it is unlikely that the order really needs to be controlled, except for optimization (which the database engine should do itself), and possibly virtual tables in some cases (although ideally there should be some way for a virtual table itself to handle such deletion optimizations, somehow).

In the case of UPDATE, updating records in the wrong order can result in conflicts (including rowid conflicts and primary key conflicts), so there will need to be some way to avoid these conflicts (although again the database engine should do this by itself, but previous messages I have seen suggest that it doesn't (or at least didn't used to do)). (This will also need to be handled somehow for virtual tables, too.)