Deletion Woes

[Randy Smith]

I have a very large table with many fields, among them a "post_date" field established as varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL and "salary" set up as decimal(11,2).

From a LOAD INI, there are some post_date entries with invalid date fields (e.g. one has "201", for instance) and some salary fields that do not have decimals (e.g. "0" instead of "0.0".)

I can find these by select, but when I change the select to a delete, I'll get "incorrect datetime value" or "incorrect decimal value". I tried "delete from table x where id in (select id from table x where year(post_date) is null)", a select that works fine on its own, but from that I get "you can't specify target table x for update in from clause.".

I tried to set salary to 0.0 or NULL with the same "incorrect decimal value: '0' for column '' at row -1" error.

How can I get rid of these bad rows of data?