DELETE

The DELETE operation permanently removes one or more documents from a Ditto collection. Once a document is deleted it cannot be recovered. Deleted documents can be re-created by using the INSERT operation with the same document id as the deleted document.

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Syntax

DELETE FROM your_collection_name
WHERE [condition]
ORDER BY [order by]
LIMIT [limit]
OFFSET [offset]

In this syntax:

• your_collection_name is the name of the collection from which you want to retrieve the data.
• [condition] represents the condition or criteria that determine which documents should be evicted from the local peer.
• [order by] represents the path within a document to use to order the dataset and order (ASC or DESC).
• [limit] represents the maximum number of documents that should be evicted.
• [offset] represents the offset from 0 that should be used for the eviction query, in practice this should be rarely used.

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Examples of Deleting Documents

Here, the document with ID 123 is permanently removed from the cars collection:

DELETE FROM cars
WHERE _id = '123'

In the following snippet, all documents created before the defined value are removed:

DELETE FROM cars
WHERE created_at < 1699888298000

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Using DQL to Delete Documents in the SDK

For specifics on deleting documents in all Ditto SDKs see SDK>CRUD>Removing Documents.

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TOMBSTONE Keyword

The TOMBSTONE keyword (currently Big Peer only) is a synonym for the new DELETE keyword. Users using the TOMBSTONE keyword will get the auto cleanup properties of DELETE without any changes.TOMBSTONE will be deprecated/removed in an upcoming Major release.

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Removing Fields from Documents

The DELETE keyword is used to remove documents from a collection. To remove a specific field from a document see UPDATE>Deleting Fields