Title: Delete A Table
Slug: delete_a_table
Summary: Delete an entire table in SQL.
Date: 2016-05-01 12:00
Category: SQL
Tags: Basics
Authors: Chris Albon

Note: This tutorial was written using Catherine Devlin's SQL in Jupyter Notebooks library. If you have not using a Jupyter Notebook, you can ignore the two lines of code below and any line containing %%sql. Furthermore, this tutorial uses SQLite's flavor of SQL, your version might have some differences in syntax.

For more, check out Learning SQL by Alan Beaulieu.



In [1]:

    
# Ignore
%load_ext sql
%sql sqlite://
%config SqlMagic.feedback = False

Create Data



In [2]:

    
%%sql

-- Create a table of criminals
CREATE TABLE criminals (pid, name, age, sex, city, minor);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (412, 'James Smith', 15, 'M', 'Santa Rosa', 1);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (234, 'Bill James', 22, 'M', 'Santa Rosa', 0);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (632, 'Stacy Miller', 23, 'F', 'Santa Rosa', 0);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (621, 'Betty Bob', NULL, 'F', 'Petaluma', 1);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (162, 'Jaden Ado', 49, 'M', NULL, 0);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (901, 'Gordon Ado', 32, 'F', 'Santa Rosa', 0);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (512, 'Bill Byson', 21, 'M', 'Santa Rosa', 0);
INSERT INTO criminals VALUES (411, 'Bob Iton', NULL, 'M', 'San Francisco', 0);









    Out[2]:





[]

Delete A Table



In [3]:

    
%%sql

-- Delete the table called 'criminals'
DROP TABLE criminals









    Out[3]:





[]

View Table



In [4]:

    
%%sql

-- Select everything
SELECT *

-- From the table 'criminals'
FROM criminals









    



(sqlite3.OperationalError) no such table: criminals [SQL: "-- Select everything\nSELECT *\n\n-- From the table 'criminals'\nFROM criminals"]

Note: We get an error because the table doesn't exist anymore.