1.4.4.5 Deleting Data

For example consider the table we created earlier:

# table Person
+----------+-----------+------------------+-------------+
| LastName | FirstName | Address          | DateOfBirth |
+----------+-----------+------------------+-------------+
| Smith    | John      | 5 Friendly Place | 1980-01-01  |
| Owen     | Jones     | 4 Great Corner   | 1990-01-01  |
+----------+-----------+------------------+-------------+

The SQL command to delete every address in the table is:

DELETE FROM Person

To delete all the data using a web.database cursor we would do the following:

cursor.delete("Person")

Note: This does not delete the table, it deletes all the data. To drop the table use the drop() method.

The table now looks like this:

+----------+-----------+---------+-------------+
| LastName | FirstName | Address | DateOfBirth |
+----------+-----------+---------+-------------+
+----------+-----------+---------+-------------+

To delete only some of the data you need to specify the where parameter. For example to delete all people with the first name 'Owen' we would use the SQL:

DELETE FROM Person WHERE FirstName='Owen'

Similarly the function to use to execute this SQL command is:

cursor.delete("Person", where="FirstName='Owen'")

The table now looks like this:

+----------+-----------+------------------+-------------+
| LastName | FirstName | Address          | DateOfBirth |
+----------+-----------+------------------+-------------+
| Smith    | John      | 5 Friendly Place | 1980-01-01  |
+----------+-----------+------------------+-------------+

The delete() method of a web.database cursor looks like this:

delete( table, [where][, autoExecute]): table should be the table name as a string. where is an SQL where clause. autoExecute is optional and can be True or False and by default takes the value of the cursor object.

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