Skip to Content
Practical PostgreSQL
book

Practical PostgreSQL

by Joshua D. Drake, John C. Worsley
January 2002
Intermediate to advanced
640 pages
16h 39m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Practical PostgreSQL

Drop Table

Removes a table from a database.

Synopsis

DROP TABLE name [, ...]

Parameters

name

The name of an existing table you intend to drop. You may drop multiple tables by specifying their names in a comma-delimited list.

Results

DROP

The message returned when a table is dropped successfully.

ERROR: table "name" does not exist!

The error returned if the specified table or view name does not exist in the database.

Description

DROP TABLE removes tables from the database. You must be the owner of the table, or a superuser, in order to drop it.

Note

Description

To empty a table (as opposed to completely deleting it), use either the TRUNCATE or DELETE command.

Deleting a table also destroys any indices that were placed on that table.

Example

The following command permanently removes the employees table from the booktown database:

booktown=# DROP TABLE employees;
DROP
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu
Learning PostgreSQL 11 - Third Edition

Learning PostgreSQL 11 - Third Edition

Christopher Travers, Andrey Volkov
PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

Dinesh Kumar, Chitij Chauhan

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449309770Errata Page