Drop all tables command

Question

What is the command to drop all tables in SQLite?

Similarly I'd like to drop all indexes.

Answer 1

While it is true that there is no DROP ALL TABLES command you can use the following set of commands.

Note: These commands have the potential to corrupt your database, so make sure you have a backup

PRAGMA writable_schema = 1; delete from sqlite_master where type in ('table', 'index', 'trigger'); PRAGMA writable_schema = 0; 

you then want to recover the deleted space with

VACUUM; 

and a good test to make sure everything is ok

PRAGMA INTEGRITY_CHECK; 

Answer 2

I don't think you can drop all tables in one hit but you can do the following to get the commands:

select 'drop table ' || name || ';' from sqlite_master     where type = 'table'; 

The output of this is a script that will drop the tables for you. For indexes, just replace table with index.

You can use other clauses in the where section to limit which tables or indexes are selected (such as "and name glob 'pax_*'" for those starting with "pax_").

You could combine the creation of this script with the running of it in a simple bash (or cmd.exe) script so there's only one command to run.

If you don't care about any of the information in the DB, I think you can just delete the file it's stored in off the hard disk - that's probably faster. I've never tested this but I can't see why it wouldn't work.