Informix DBA Survival Guide, Second Edition

Clean Selected Data out of a Table

The above methods are workable if you want to delete all rows from a table. What about when you need to delete only some of the rows? Or you need to move some of the rows out of the table and archive them in another table. This is a common task in database management, and it is one that seems to be forgotten many times in the design of applications.

Programmers seem to spend a lot of time figuring out how to put data into tables, but they often do not spend quite as much time devising methods to remove obsolete data. In many ways, the database is a black hole to developers. They tend to think that they can continue to add data to it forever. But the DBA knows different. We have to clean these things up!

As a ...