DELETE and TRUNCATE differ in some more important and subtle ways than the auto increment counter.
The most important difference is DELETE operations are
transaction-safe and logged, which means DELETEs can be rolled back.
TRUNCATE cannot be done inside a transaction and can’t be rolled back.
Because TRUNCATE is not logged recovering a mistakenly TRUNCATEd table
is a much bigger problem than recovering from a DELETE.
DELETE will fail if foreign key constraints are broken; TRUNCATE may
not honor foreign key constraints (it does for InnoDB tables). DELETE
will fire any ON DELETE triggers; TRUNCATE will not.
TRUNCATE is probably better thought of as a shortcut for DROP TABLE/CREATE TABLE rather than a quirky kind of DELETE.
These differences are not specific to mySQL — PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, and Oracle behave more or less the same way.
Well this is very common but much confused discussion. This question
is often asked from freshers in interviews as well. The difference is
pretty simple but yet people confuse it because they see the result to
be the same of both the queries.
Truncate and Delete are both SQL commands which result in removing the table records. So lets list the differences one by one :
Type of Command – Truncate is a DDL command and Delete is a Dml command
RollBack - As mentioned above Truncate is DDL
command, so the changes made by it are committed automatically hence
there is nothing called rollback when you use truncate, while Delete
commands can be rolled back
Table Structure – When you use Truncate command, all
the rows in the table are delete and the structure of the table is
recreated and so does the indexes. On the contrary if you use Delete
command only the desired rows or all the rows are deleted and the
structure remains unchanged.
Syntax - The syntax for both the commands is :
Truncate table <tablename> #command to truncate a table.
Delete from <tablename> #command to delete all the records from table.
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Practical example -
#creates a table with 2 columns, 1st column is auto incremented
Create table mysqlDemo (id integer not null auto_increment,name varchar(100),PRIMARY KEY(id));
#now insert two records in the table
insert into mysqlDemo(name)values ('sachin');
insert into mysqlDemo(name)values ('digimantra');
#check the records and note their auto_increment values
select * from mysqlDemo;
#Let us try delete it using Delete command
delete from mysqlDemo;
#Now the table is empty, lets insert values from the first row.
insert into mysqlDemo(name)values ('new_sachin');
insert into mysqlDemo(name)values ('new_digimantra');
#check the records and note their auto_increment values
select * from mysqlDemo; #the aut_increment values will continue from the last records, as the table structure is preserved.
#Now let us Truncate the table and re-insert the values.
Truncate table mysqlDemo;
insert into mysqlDemo(name)values ('sachin');
insert into mysqlDemo(name)values ('digimantra');
#check the records and note their auto_increment values
select * from mysqlDemo;
#this time the auto_increment value will start from one, as the table structure is recreated because we used Truncate instead of Delete.
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So this is what the difference is, in short always remember Truncate
command recreates the structure of the table and deletes all the records
of the table. However Delete command does not recreates the structure
and deletes the complete or partial records (as desired) from the table.