Thanks a lot, that's very clear for me now !
Arnaud
>It's useful to think of the behavior of UPDATE as exactly like a
>SELECT, except that rather than reporting the selected rows to you,
>it changes them per the SET target list. Had you written
>
>select utilisateur.* from utilisateur, utilisateur a, ancien b
>where a.util_id=b.util_id and b.anc_deces is not null and
> (a.login<>'*' or a.password<>'*');
>
>the error would be moderately obvious, no?