Deleting Data in SQL
The SQL ‘delete’ statement can be used for removing a record or records from a database table, which looks as follows.
DELETE FROM table_name WHERE where_condition
The following example deletes a record from the ‘person‘ table, as previously used in the examples for selecting, inserting and updating data, based on the ‘id’ being equal to 3.
DELETE FROM person WHERE id = 3;
The contents of the ‘person‘ table now looks like this.
id | firstname | lastname | title | dob |
1 | Fred | Bloggs | Mr | 1980-05-05 |
2 | Simon | Smith | Mr | 1960-04-01 |
4 | Fiona | Adams | Mrs | 1985-05-19 |
5 | John | Smith | Mr | 1985-10-12 |
As with the ‘update‘ statement, multiple records can be deleted at once, if, for example, the ‘where’ condition specified ‘lastname’ to be equal to ‘Smith’, then two records would be deleted.