To remove records from a table without removing the table itself, use the DELETE or TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Either of the following statements completely empties the named table: DELETE FROM t; TRUNCATE TABLE t; DELETE takes an optional WHERE clause that identifies which records to remove. This is useful when only a given subset of records from a table need to be deleted. The following statement removes only those records from t that have a status column value of 'expired', in order by the id column and output limited to 4 rows: DELETE FROM t WHERE status = 'expired' ORDER BY id LIMIT 4; TRUNCATE also will reset the metadata held within the format files of the table being truncated ( .frm ) such as the AUTO_INCREMENT starting value.
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