Sounds like a buggy database to me (happened in 1976 - maybe just an incomplete database really) and thats not really surprising. In any case we deal with const

Sounds like a buggy database to me (happened in 1976 - maybe just an incomplete database really) and thats not really surprising. In any case we deal with constraints all the time. For fun, would this not correct the issue? update employee set salary = salary * 1.10 where id in (select id from employee where salary<=25000); This should decouple the select from the update and make each of them discreet operations where the select runs first.