Introduction
A question I recently saw on Stack Overflow titled Faster way to delete matching [database] rows? prompted me to organize my thoughts and observations on the subject and quickly jot them down here.
Here is the brief description of the task: say, you have 2 MySQL tables a and b. The tables contain the same type of data, for example log entries. Now you want to delete all or a subset of the entries in table a that exist in table b.
Solutions Suggested By Others
DELETE FROM a WHERE EXISTS (SELECT b.id FROM b WHERE b.id = a.id);
DELETE a FROM a INNER JOIN b on a.id=b.id;
DELETE FROM a WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM b)
The Problem With Suggested Solutions
Solutions above are all fine if the tables are quite small and the …
[Read more]