Delete

The DELETE statement deletes documents that satisfy the predicates in the WHERE clause. If you don’t specify the WHERE clause, all documents are deleted.

Setting

The DELETE statement is disabled by default. To enable the DELETE functionality in SQL, you need to update the configuration by sending the following request:

PUT _plugins/_query/settings
{
  "transient": {
    "plugins.sql.delete.enabled": "true"
  }
}

Syntax

Rule singleDeleteStatement:

Example

SQL query:

DELETE FROM accounts
WHERE age > 30

Explain:

{
  "size" : 1000,
  "query" : {
    "bool" : {
      "must" : [
        {
          "range" : {
            "age" : {
              "from" : 30,
              "to" : null,
              "include_lower" : false,
              "include_upper" : true,
              "boost" : 1.0
            }
          }
        }
      ],
      "adjust_pure_negative" : true,
      "boost" : 1.0
    }
  },
  "_source" : false
}

Result set:

{
  "schema" : [
    {
      "name" : "deleted_rows",
      "type" : "long"
    }
  ],
  "total" : 1,
  "datarows" : [
    [
      3
    ]
  ],
  "size" : 1,
  "status" : 200
}

The datarows field shows the number of documents deleted.