Delete statements

An delete statement permanently removes rows from a table.

Its syntax typically looks like so. Note that rarely-used clauses have been excluded from this diagram -- see the bottom of this section for a full diagram.

delete-stmt

All of the complexity of a delete statement goes in its where clause, which determines which rows to delete from the table. Rows for which the where expression evaluates to true will be deleted.

If no where clause is supplied, all rows in the table will be deleted, which is usually not what you want.

Limited deletes

Occasionally it is useful to delete only a limited number of rows.

Often you can do this with a where Id in(select Id from ... limit x). In fact, this is the most flexible approach.

However, it is also possible to put a limit clause on the delete statement itself, which may perform better on some database backends.

This is the full syntax for the delete statement.