Citus Blog

One of the many unique abilities of SQL databases is to transform data using advanced SQL queries and joins in a transactional manner. Commands like UPDATE and DELETE are commonly used for manipulating individual rows, but they become truly powerful when you can use subqueries to determine which rows to modify and how to modify them. It allows you to implement batch processing operations in a thread-safe, transactional, scalable manner.

Citus recently added support for UPDATE/DELETE commands with subqueries that span across all the data. Together with the CTE infrastructure that we’ve introduced over the past few releases, this gives you a new set of powerful distributed data transformation commands. As always, we’ve made sure that queries are executed as quickly and efficiently as possible by spreading out the work to where the data is stored.

Let’s look at an example of how you can use UPDATE/DELETE with subqueries.

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