MySQL and mSQL

Name

DELETE

Synopsis

DELETE FROM table [WHERE clause]

Deletes rows from a table. When used without a WHERE clause, this will erase the entire table and recreate it as an empty table. With a clause, it will delete the rows that match the condition of the clause. This statement returns the number of rows deleted to the user.

As mentioned above, not including a WHERE clause will erase this entire table. This is done using an efficient method that is much faster than deleting each row individually. When using this method, MySQL returns to the user because it has no way of knowing how many rows it deleted. In the current design, this method simply deletes all of the files associated with the table except for the file that contains the actual table definition. Therefore, this is a handy method of zeroing out tables with unrecoverably corrupt data files. You will lose the data, but the table structure will still be in place.

You must have DELETE privileges on a database to use the following statement:

Examples

# Erase all of the data (but not the table itself) for the table 'olddata'.
DELETE FROM olddata
# Erase all records in the 'sales' table where the 'year' field is '1995'.
DELETE FROM sales WHERE year=1995