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DELETE .. ORDER BY .. LIMIT

Applies to ✅ Open Source Edition   ✅ Express Edition   ✅ Professional Edition   ✅ Enterprise Edition

The ORDER BY and LIMIT clauses allow for deleting only a subset of the data in a table, based on their ordering. This can be useful to implement queue semantics, e.g. to delete only the top row, and possibly return it in one go.

Dialect support

This example using jOOQ:

deleteFrom(BOOK).orderBy(BOOK.ID.asc()).limit(1)

Translates to the following dialect specific expressions:

Aurora MySQL, CockroachDB, DB2, MariaDB, MySQL, Trino

DELETE FROM BOOK
ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
LIMIT 1

Aurora Postgres, BigQuery, DuckDB, Exasol, HSQLDB, Hana, Redshift, SQLite, Snowflake, Vertica, YugabyteDB

DELETE FROM BOOK
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  LIMIT 1
)

ClickHouse

DELETE FROM BOOK
WHERE ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  LIMIT 1
)

Derby, H2, Oracle, Postgres

DELETE FROM BOOK
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY
)

Firebird

DELETE FROM BOOK
ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
ROWS 1

Informix

DELETE FROM BOOK
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT *
  FROM (
    SELECT FIRST 1 BOOK.ID
    FROM BOOK
    ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  ) x
)

MemSQL

DELETE FROM BOOK
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT *
  FROM (
    SELECT BOOK.ID
    FROM BOOK
    ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
    LIMIT 1
  ) t
)

SQLDataWarehouse, SQLServer, Sybase

DELETE FROM BOOK
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT TOP 1 BOOK.ID
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
)

Teradata

DELETE FROM BOOK
WHERE BOOK.ID IN (
  SELECT *
  FROM (
    SELECT TOP 1 BOOK.ID
    FROM BOOK
    ORDER BY BOOK.ID ASC
  ) x
)

ASE, Access

/* UNSUPPORTED */
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