How to delete a range of records at once on MySQL?

Question

I have rows over 60000 in my table. How can I delete rows from 40000 to 50000 at once?

Answer 1

You can use the between function:

delete from exampleTable where id between 40000 and 50000 

or:

delete from exampleTable where id >= 40000 and id <= 50000 

pretty simple?

Answer 2

I'm assuming you want to do this based on the the default order of the table, and you don't have a natural key or some other way to order these in the table data.

I.e. SELECT * FROM WORDS returns:

Hi Hello Bye Goodbye What's up 

So if you said you wanted to delete rows 2 to 4, do you want to delete Hello, Bye, and Goodbye. Right?

Is the return order of your table deterministic? In other words, to you get the results in the same order every time? Ideally, you would be able to identify a column in your table that contains data you could key off of, which would let you use Tricker's answer.

If that isn't true, you will need to use the row number for your between statement. I'm not a mysql user, the code below would undoubtedly be cleaner if I were. Additionally, I don't even have a mysql database to test the query against. I put together a sql statement using this post as a reference for how to get a row num in mysql. With MySQL, how can I generate a column containing the record index in a table?

My query assumes you have some kind of primary key on your table. If not, there is no way to guarantee that you wont delete extraneous rows, plus it's good table design.

DELETE FROM YOUR_TABLE  WHERE primarykey =  (SELECT  primarykey FROM     (SELECT t.primarykey,             @curRow := @curRow + 1 AS row_number    FROM    YOUR_TABLE t    JOIN    (SELECT @curRow := 0) r)  WHERE row_number between 40000 and 50000);