The Oracle (tm) Users' Co-Operative FAQ
What's the difference between DELETE ROWS and TRUNCATE TABLE ?
| Author's name: Norman Dunbar
Author's Email: Oracle@bountifulsolutions.co.uk |
Date written: 08/03/2002 Oracle version(s): 7.3.4 onwards |
| What's the difference between DELETE ROWS and TRUNCATE TABLE ? |
Delete
At the simplest level, delete scans the table and removes any rows that match the given criteria in the (optional) where clause. It generates rollback information so that the deletions can be undone should it be necessary. Index entries for the deleted rows are removed from the indexes. You must commit to make the deletions permanent.
When deleting rows from a table, extents are not deallocated, so if there were 50 extents in the table before the deletion, there will still be 50 after the deletion. In addition the High Water Mark is not moved down, so it remains where it was before the deletion began. This means that any subsequent full table scans may (still) take a long time to complete - because a full table scan always scans up to the HWM. So, by example, if a select count(*) from very_large_table; took 15 minutes to complete before all the rows were deleted, you will find that it still takes about 15 mins after the deletion - because Oracle is still scanning every single block up to the HWM - even though some (or all) of the blocks may have no data in them.
Truncate
Truncate, on the other hand, simply moves the high water mark on the table right down to the beginning. It does this very quickly, and does not need to be committed. Once you truncate a table, there is no going back. Indexes are also truncated. There is no facility to be able to specify which rows to 'delete' as you can with the where clause on the delete command.
When a table is truncated, all its extents are deallocated leaving only the extents specified when the table was originally created. So if the table was originally created with minextents 3, there will be 3 extents remaining when the tables is truncated.
If you specify the reuse storage clause, then the extents are not deallocated. This saves time in the recursive SQL department if you intend to reload the table with data from an export for example, and can reduce the time it takes to do the import as there is no need to dynamically allocate any new extents.
Further reading:
Oracle SQL reference manual.
