DELETE Statement in Oracle SQL – PLSQL

The DELETE statement in Oracle SQL / PLSQL allows us to delete record(s) in a table.

Syntax for the DELETE statement in Oracle SQL / PLSQL is:

DELETE FROM table_name
WHERE conditions;

Let’s take an example for understanding:
Suppose have a table named ‘employee’ in the database as shown below.

Scenario 1:

Suppose we want to delete the employee having employee_id = 105 from the ‘employee’ table.
The same can be achieved using the DELETE statement as follows

DELETE FROM employee
WHERE employee_id = 105;

The above statement will delete record from the table where employee_id = 105

Now if we query the ‘employee’ table as;

SELECT *
FROM employee;

We will get the following result:

Here we can see that a record with employee_id = 105 has been successfully deleted from the ‘employee’ table.

Scenario 2:

Deleting more than one record at a time in an already existing table:
Let’s assume that we have a new table namely ‘employee’ as shown below:

Here we can see that we have 2 employees in the ‘Sales’ department and we want to delete them.
We can achieve the same as:

DELETE FROM employee
WHERE department = 'Sales';

Once we have run the above code we can query the ‘employee’ table and the following will be the result:

Here we have successfully deleted the desired records from ‘employee’ table in one shot.