When it comes to deleting data from a SQL server, you have 3 main options: Drop, Delete, and Truncate

Drop

The Drop command completely deletes a table from the database. Let’s take the table Employee

When I run the following code: Drop Table Employee;

You can see the entire table has been dropped from the database, data and all. There is no way to recover data from a dropped table, short of having a back up

Delete

Delete removes data from the table, not the table its. Also, Delete can be used in conjunction with a Where clause to choose exactly which data to delete

You see that only the row with ‘Chris’ was deleted

Without the Where clause, all data is deleted, however the table remains

Truncate

Truncate acts just like Delete but you can’t add a Where clause, it simply deletes all data from a table