Why can't I use an alias in a DELETE statement?

Question

In SQL Server Compact Edition in Visual Studio 2010 (maybe SQL Server and SQL in general, I don't know), this command works:

DELETE FROM foods WHERE (name IN ('chickens', 'rabbits'))

but this command produces an error of Error near identifier f. Expecting OUTPUT.

DELETE FROM foods f WHERE (f.name IN ('chickens', 'rabbits'))

Answer 1

To alias the table name you can use the below code:

DELETE f FROM dbo.foods AS f WHERE f.name IN (...);

According to IIRC, DELETE statement is not strictly ANSI. But, for other query forms such as correlation aliasing is necessary.