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Posted by Fabian Raschke
Fabian Raschke
2,908 Points

How to DROP several TABLES with a wildcard?

Hi,

I have a lot of tables in my DB that I want to delete. They all start with 'temp'.

How can I delete all of them at once?

3 Answers

Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points
Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points

maybe: DROP table WHERE table LIKE "temp%' ;

Fabian Raschke
Fabian Raschke
2,908 Points

No, that doesn't work.

Fabian Raschke
Fabian Raschke
2,908 Points
Fabian Raschke
Fabian Raschke
2,908 Points

I am doing the Deep Dive "Database Foundations" with Andrew Chalkley (who is a great and funny tutor) but I haven't found a solution there. May anybody give me a hint?

Andrew Chalkley
STAFF
Andrew Chalkley
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Andrew Chalkley
Andrew Chalkley
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Hi Fabian Raschke

I looked in the documentation and it doesn't look like it's possible.

You could use another programming language to do SHOW tables where Tables_in_<database_name_here> LIKE 'temp%' and then cycle over them and drop each one.

Hope that helps.
Andrew