The DELETE statement is the simplest of all, but quite powerful.

The DELETE Statement

The DELETE statement is the simplest of all, but quite powerful. You can use

the DELETE statement to delete one or more rows in one or more tables. The

DELETE statement is just as dangerous as the UPDATE statement, as you

can see, because it cheerfully deletes data without prompting. If you

accidentally run a DELETE statement, it's difficult to recover your data. You

should rarely use a DELETE statement without a WHERE clause. If you want

to delete all the data from a table it's much more efficient to use a different

type of statement, one of a group of statements that alters the datable itself-

the TRUNCATE TABLE statement.

Truncating a table removes all the data and resets the identity column value to

its default.

You should rarely use DELETE without a WHERE clause. There is one

reason to do so. The TRUNCATE statement is not logged — that means you

can't recover if you use it automatically, whereas the DELETE statement is a

logged operation. That's the reason TRUNCATE is so much more efficient—

it avoids the log operations, but it also means the data is unrecoverable from

the transaction log.