Delete or update statement without where clauses

Reports usages of DELETE or UPDATE statements without WHERE clauses.

Without WHERE clauses, DELETE drops all the data from the table, and UPDATE overwrites values for all the table rows.

Example (MySQL):

CREATE TABLE t1 (a TEXT, b INT, c BOOLEAN);
update t1 set  a = 'Smith';
delete from t1;

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

SqlWithoutWhere

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | SQL

Inspection ID: SqlWithoutWhereInspection

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Delete or update statement without where clauses inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Don't warn if there exists 'limit' clause

Option ID:

myDontWarnForLimit

Default value:

Selected

Don't warn if there exist self-references in the query (i.e., set id = id + 1)

Option ID:

myDontWarnForSelfRefs

Default value:

Selected

Don't warn if there exists 'join' clause with condition

Option ID:

myDontWarnForJoins

Default value:

Selected

Don't warn if statement is applied to temporary table

Option ID:

myDontWarnForTemporaryTable

Default value:

Selected

Don't warn for trivial conditions

Option ID:

myDontWarnForTrivialConditions

Default value:

Selected

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection SqlWithoutWhere

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	CLion 2025.2, DataGrip 2025.2, DataSpell 2025.2, GoLand 2025.2, IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, JetBrains Rider 2025.2, PhpStorm 2025.2, PyCharm 2025.2, Qodana for .NET 2025.2, Qodana for Go 2025.2, Qodana for JS 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2, Qodana for PHP 2025.2, Qodana for Ruby 2025.2, RubyMine 2025.2, WebStorm 2025.2

Last modified: 18 September 2025