Sams Teach Yourself Transact-SQL in 21 Days, Second Edition

Deleting Rows

The last of the action statements that we will cover today is the DELETE statement. You have already seen how to add and insert data into a table in the database. You also learned how to modify and update that data. Now, you will see how to remove or delete rows from a table. The syntax of the DELETE statement is

DELETE <table_name | view_name>
[WHERE <condition>]

The first thing that you will probably realize is that the DELETE command does not have a prompt. Users (yourself included) are accustomed to being prompted before doing something that can destroy data or files. The "Are you sure?" message box is a common sight before performing a delete operation.

The following example deletes a row from the customer_demo table:

 Delete ...