Home / Database Structure / Tables / Question No: 210

To remove records from a table without removing the table itself, MySQL provides DELETE or TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Either of the following statements completely empties the named table:

DELETE FROM tbl_name;
TRUNCATE TABLE tbl_name;

DELETE takes an optional WHERE clause that identifies which records to remove. This is useful when you want to delete only a given subset of records from a table. The following statement removes only those records from tbl_name that have a status column value of 'expired':

DELETE FROM tbl_name WHERE status = 'expired';