Delete Data - DELETE

Now let's delete some data using DB Browser. It is great and terrible how easy it is to wipe out data in a database.

Delete with SQL

This Person was a mistake on entry, so let's just delete it.

Let's see how to delete it with SQL:

DELETE
FROM users
WHERE last = "Person";

This means, more or less:

Hey SQL database 👋, I want to DELETE rows FROM the table called users.

Please delete all the rows WHERE the value of the column last is equal to "Person".

Remember that when using a SELECT statement it has the form:

SELECT [some stuff here]
FROM [name of a table here]
WHERE [some condition here]

DELETE is very similar, and again we use FROM to tell the table to work on, and we use WHERE to tell the condition to use to match the rows that we want to delete.

You can try that in DB Browser for SQLite:

Have in mind that DELETE is to delete entire rows, not single values in a row.

If you want to "delete" a single value in a column while keeping the row, you would instead update the row as explained in the previous chapter, setting the specific value of the column in that row to NULL (to None in Python).

id	email	first	last	username
1	colrc@gmail.com	Lawrence	Nicodemus	original
2	jdoe@gmail.com	John	Doe	jdoe
3	jadoe@gmail.com	Jane	Doe	jadoe
null	rdoe@gmail.com	Robert	Doe	rdoe
5	nobody@gmail.com ✨	New	Person	nperson

Recap

Deleting rows is trivial. 🔥 Unless you run into constraint violations, which we will examine in the next tutorial.