Tech Blog

SQL Delete vs Truncate vs Drop

By: Chris Dunn on Tue May 1, 2018 (3 min read)

There are three common commands used to remove data from a SQL database.  The commands are DELETE, TRUNCATE and DROP.  I've seen DELETE and TRUNCATE used more interchangeably than they should and threw in DROP to round out the commands.  Each command serves a different use case and so it deserves a bit of attention to understand how they are different. DELETE Delete is a row level command and referred to as DML (Data Manipulation Language).  It allows you to remove rows from a table with the abi ...